Beyond authorship: Analyzing contributions in PLOS ONE and the challenges of appropriate attribution

Figure 1.

Figure 2.

Figure 3.

Figure 4.

Figure 5.

CRediT criteria based on whether they are sufficient on their own for authorship or not_

Contributor role	Role definition	Authorship eligibility
Conceptualization	Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims.	Yes
Data Curation	Management activities to annotate (produce metadata), scrub data and maintain research data (including software code, where it is necessary for interpreting the data itself) for initial use and later reuse.	Yes
Formal Analysis	Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyze or synthesize study data.	Yes
Investigation	Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection.	Yes
Methodology	Development or design of methodology; creation of models	Yes
Software	Programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components.	Yes
Validation	Verification, whether as a part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs.	Yes
Visualization	Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualization/data presentation.	Yes
Writing – Original Draft Preparation	Creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation).	Yes
Writing – Review & Editing	Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work by those from the original research group, specifically critical review, commentary or revision – including pre- or post-publication stages.	Yes
Funding Acquisition	Acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication.	No
Project Administration	Management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution.	No
Resources	Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools.	No
Supervision	Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team.	No

Number of DOI-based papers that fall into categories 1-3 of potential inappropriate authorship_

Authorship type	Not meet authorship criteria	Potential authorship by resources	Potential APC ring	Count	# by type	% by type
Appropriate authorship	No	No	No	74,346	74,346	90.86%
	Yes	No	No	4849
	No	Yes	No	2008
Inappropriate authorship	Yes	Yes	No	585	7477	9.14%
	No	No	Yes	21
	Yes	No	Yes	14
	Total			81,823	81,823	100.00%

Median total works count and citations number by author, by authorship type_

Authorship type	Total works count by author (median)	Total number of citations received by author (median)
Potential APC ring	104	1594
Not meet authorship criteria	91	1316
Potential authorship by resources	58	849
Authorship meets the criteria defined by PLOS ONE	38	481

Specialization index in inappropriate authorship by affiliation type_

Affiliation type	Potential APC ring	Potential authorship by resources	Not meet authorship criteria
Other	2.97	0.67	0.52
Company	2.06	1.54	0.99
Nonprofit	1.58	1.00	0.69
Facility	1.22	1.34	0.94
Education	1.01	0.87	0.99
Healthcare	0.98	1.20	1.18
Unknown	0.39	1.17	0.96
Government	0.00	1.17	1.05
Archive	0.00	1.16	0.48

Number of authors according to types of inappropriate authorship_

Authorship type	# by type	# by group	%	% by group
APC ring	46		0.01%
Authorship by resources	5 087	14,022	0.93%	2.56%
Not meet authorship criteria	8 889		1.63%
Authorship meets the criteria defined by PLOS ONE	532,858	532,858	97.44%	97.44%
Total	546,880	546,880	100.00%	100.00%