Letters
Statisticians should be coauthors
EDITOR,--Neville W Goodman outlines criteria for authorship of published material.1 Medical research is often, by its nature, multidisciplinary, and frequently the authorship of papers reflects this. As statisticians we find that analysis is rarely just a "simple manipulation on a computer" but involves a great deal of time and care from the study's design stage, through checking of the data and statistical analysis, to presentation of the results. The application of "standard statistical tests" does not necessarily imply that the analysis was straightforward; it may imply that more complicated methods of analysis, which are often less easy to interpret, were considered to be inappropriate.
We therefore believe that statisticians' contribution to medical research should generally be recognised through coauthorship and not simply through their receiving "credit for what they have done and nothing more." Our criterion for a substantial contribution worthy of coauthorship is: processing the results; providing new insight
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