Trends in the Number of Authors and Institutions in Papers Published in AJPE 2015-2019

DISCUSSION

Across multiple disciplines, the number of authors per paper has been steadily rising over the past several decades.^10-12 Likewise, our study, which focused on one pharmacy education journal, AJPE, showed a significant increase in the number of authors per paper over a five-year period.

The National Library of Medicine published a report on the number of authors per MEDLINE/PubMed citation, noting several factors that may account for the increasing trend of group authorship.² One factor could be the policy related to author names in MEDLINE has changed with time. For example, the personal author limit changed from 10 (1983) to 25 (1996) and was then completely removed in 2000.² According to MEDLINE, a personal author is listed when the author names appear in the article byline. Alternatively, they can be listed anywhere in the text or as members of a writing group or writing committee.¹³ We considered all individuals who were listed in the byline of AJPE papers as personal authors.

Another factor is the emphasis placed on the number of manuscripts one must publish in peer-reviewed journals to be considered for promotion and/or tenure dossiers in higher education. Dixon and colleagues reported on pharmacy practice chairs’ scholarship productivity as quantified by their publication metrics, including their total publications, publications per year, total citations, citations per publication, h-index, and M quotient.¹⁴ A higher scholarship productivity was noted in chairs with a higher faculty rank, those in public institutions, those whose institution was part of a health science center, those whose institution was considered R1 by the Carnegie Classification, those whose institution was listed in the top 25 National Institute of Health funding rankings using the Blue Ridge Institute for Medical Research, and those whose institution had a higher US News and World Report ranking.¹⁴ Given the importance of these metrics in maintaining a school’s reputation, chairs with higher publication metrics may also be essential for stimulating their colleagues to enhance their own publication records by serving as mentors or having connections at other institutions.

In pharmacy education, the heightened emphasis on SOTL leads to the desire to invite students and residents/fellows to participate in our research endeavors and may account, in part, for the increased number of authors. While this practice teaches students, residents, and fellows to learn how to conduct appropriate research and how to work in a team, a potential disadvantage is determining who should be credited for authorship and who should be recognized in the acknowledgments. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) defines the term author and recommends that authorship be based on specific criteria. Those listed as authors must have made either substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work or substantial contributions to the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work. In addition, they must be involved in drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content, give final approval of the version to be published, and agree to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.¹⁵ Students in their first postgraduate year (PGY1) pursuing residencies, PGY1 residents pursuing PGY2 residencies, and residents/postdoctoral fellows pursuing academic careers who realize that having their names on scholarly publications is essential to being selected for these positions may push for authorship when their contributions may not merit authorship credit. The extent of authorship or recognition should be discussed with these students, residents, and postdoctoral fellows as the study design is being developed and implemented.

The increase in the number of unique institutions could be the result of expanded collaborations across universities. The AJPE instructions to authors emphasize that manuscripts should be of broad interest to the Academy instead of focusing on single institutions or programs.¹⁶ As such, AJPE encourages submissions that are broad in scope rather than local (one school) or regional (localized area or country), as this will expand the interest of the readership.¹⁶ In addition, the number of institutions (hospitals, medical centers, ambulatory clinics, etc) associated with a college/school of pharmacy has risen due to the need for more affiliations to provide the required clinical introductory and advanced pharmacy practice sites in Doctor of Pharmacy programs.⁷ This results in a larger number of pharmacy practice clinicians, both faculty and nonfaculty members, who may be involved in enhancing pharmacy education and SOTL. In contrast, Tilak and colleagues suggested that the growth in authorship in medical publications reflects inflationary growth in the number of authors rather than the increased complexity of the research.¹²

The focus on interprofessional teaching and practice in pharmacy education could also contribute to increases in authors and unique institutions. In addition, increased specialization in clinical practice, biomedical sciences, pharmaceutical sciences, and biostatics/study design will require greater professional expertise only available through collaborations with other individuals and institutions, resulting in an increased number of research and teaching collaborations through large health care networks that drive up the total number of authors and institutions. The 2013-2014 AACP Academic Affairs Report and the 2014-2015 Argus Commission Report emphasized the importance of big data, academic analytics, and learning analytics.^17,18 The use of these larger data sets across institutions could lead to a larger number of authors and unique institutions. There is also a greater focus on building communities across various institutions to support student learning and programmatic assessment,^19-21 team-based learning,²² experiential learning,^23-25 and interprofessional experiential education.²⁶

The number of authors and unique institutions for the Lyman Award–nominated papers did not change over this period. Most of these nominated papers were Research papers. A limited number of authors and unique institutions could result in a study design that is more focused in its objectives and goals, thus leading to stronger results, discussion, and conclusions in the paper. These findings also could result from the sample size for Lyman Award–nominated papers being much smaller (an average of 25 per year), likely resulting in less power to detect a significant change over these selected years.

Discussion continues in the literature around the topics of authorship and allocation of credit, particularly when multidisciplinary teams are involved across various organizations and institutions. Various professional societies, universities, and journals have developed guidelines and best practices for whom and when an individual should be considered for authorship.^27,28 This is becoming more important as SOTL continues to expand with the advancements in pharmacy education, with more pharmacy colleges/schools, and with the importance of scholarly activities in pharmacy programs. This often results in larger research teams across multiple institutions and organizations. It is critical to determine at the start of any research project that may result in a scholarly manuscript who is to be credited for their contributions and authorship. Individuals who do not meet ICMJE’s authorship¹⁵ criteria should be listed in the acknowledgments section to be fair and ethical to those who have either planned or performed the research and participated extensively in the writing of the manuscript. The implications of these findings suggest that AJPE should consider requiring the specific contributions of the authors to be given either in the submission process or as a specific section of the manuscript. Furthermore, perhaps the Academy should consider alternative methods of recognition for outstanding scholarly publications that result from greater collaborations and interprofessional cooperation, as this is becoming an expectation for programming at associations’ annual meetings, or, alternatively, the Academy could limit the number of individuals and institutions involved with submissions of these programming ideas.²⁹

The first limitation of this study is that it only reviewed five years of data from one pharmacy education journal. A second limitation is that the number of unique institutions was based upon our decision to separate health care networks and clinics from pharmacy colleges/schools. As such, this might increase the number of institutions depending upon what the authors indicated in their own affiliations. We also note the slight decline in 2018 in the number of authors and unique institutions, which could have occurred because the total number of manuscripts submitted from 2017 to 2018 decreased by 15% (data not shown).