Disputed authorship

Last year, a paper was published with four named authors. The journal concerned then received a letter from another person claiming that they should also have been credited with authorship. That person (Dr M) had been the second author on an abstract with a similar title presented at a conference, on which the authors of the published paper were also named authors. The journal wrote to the first author of the paper (Dr L). She responded as follows: “The abstract was one of three submitted by our research group, describing early findings from two separate studies that investigated the epidemiology of gonorrhoea. All of the abstracts were written by Dr L several months before the meeting. Dr M was not involved in the published study, but as part of the research group, and could potentially have contributed at a later stage. With the benefit of hindsight Dr M’s name should have been included only on abstracts from the study in which she was participating.” According to the first author of the paper, Dr M’s involvement in the research had been to conduct interviews with patients and enter data from those interviews. Dr L goes on to say in her letter: “Dr M did not participate in conception or design of the published study which started before her contract began. She did not contribute to data collection, data entry or editing, statistical analysis, interpretation of results, drafting or revision of the manuscript.” Dr L then goes on to describe the contribution of the other three named authors of the paper, all of whom seem to have contributed to conception, data collection and revising of the manuscript. The point of issue here seems to be that Dr M was part of the research group, although not directly involved in the study which was published in the journal, despite the fact that her name was included on the abstract when it was presented at the conference. According to Dr L, the project on which Dr M worked directly has not yet been written up. According to Dr M, as second author on the abstract, she was not told that her name would be omitted from the list of authors when the paper was submitted for publication.