Scientific Contribution List Categories Investigation: a comparison between three mainstream medical journals

How can we represent scientific contributions in articles through categories? The scientific contributions’ identification in articles is relevant with regard to issues such as authorship credit, transparency, and responsibility. The major medical journals have adopted the recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) to indicate the contributions in publications. However, the nomenclature of these contributions is different for each one, making it difficult to identify them when compared between journals. We analyze contributions list from 2024 articles with 20,098 authors, published in three mainstream medical journals: Annals of Internal Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, and PLoS Medicine. This study presents two main findings. First, a system grouping scientific contributions with seven categories divided into two groups: (1) Theory; and (2) Methodology and Logistics. Theory is composed of the following contributions: Study Concept, Study Supervision, Critical Revision and Funding and/or Support. While Methodology and Logistics have: Original Draft, Statistical Analysis, and Data Collection. Second, the major contributions are related to the categories related to the theoretical (Theory) argument of the articles, showing that these authors are the most experienced. Already Methodology and Logistics are essential to the application of theoretical concepts and support, representing substantial contributions. Thus, the grouping of the proposed categories can help authors to identify and indicate their contributions in articles more clearly, balancing the ethical issues related to the attribution of authorship to researchers. We also present a equivalence table to contribution categories between the three journals analyzed in this study.