Authorship Trends in the Rheumatology Literature, 1990–2020
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To the Editor: The number of cited authors per publication has increased substantially over time in the field of medicine.1,2 This trend of “authorship inflation” has been observed in high-impact medical journals1 and multiple medical subspecialties,2 but to our knowledge has yet to be assessed in the field of rheumatology. In this analysis, we describe the number of cited authors in rheumatology publications over a 30-year period. A search of PubMed (NLM) MEDLINE-indexed rheumatology publications from January 1, 1990, to January 11, 2020, was designed by an experienced research librarian and conducted to identify rheumatology clinical practice guidelines, randomized controlled trials (RCTs), systematic reviews and metaanalyses (SRMAs), non-SRMA review articles, and case reports (see Supplementary Data for search terms and strategy, …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.101 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.021 | 0.033 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".