Authorship Issues Related to Software Tools

The case report by Welker and McCue in the current issue of JAMIA1 raises a number of important ethical concerns, both directly and indirectly. First is the longstanding debate, discussed by Welker and McCue, about what constitutes authorship. Some recent reports2–6 suggest replacing “authorship” with “contributorship.” Under such a model, submitted manuscripts would list all individuals contributing to a publication, along with careful documentation of each individual's actual contribution(s) to the work. This model would provide for only a small number of “key” project members, such as the principal investigator and individual(s) who both contribute in major ways and who also write large segments of the manuscript, to have “author” status.Even short of authorship, there exists an ethical impetus to acknowledge important contributors to published works. One might address the dilemma presented in the case report by Welker and McCue simply by placing in the Acknowledgments section of a paper a citation to the original (local) developers of the software tools used. Similarly, the Acknowledgments section might also list the agencies that funded local development of software tools used.Mechanisms exist for developers of biomedical software tools to describe their software, per se, in the literature. For example, JAMIA publishes Methods papers describing new approaches to a … Correspondence and reprints: Dr. Randolph A. Miller, Room B003C Eskind Biomedical Library, 2209 Garland Ave., Nashville, TN 37232; e-mail: