Another weird authorship shenanigan for your consideration

This is, vaguely, related to an ongoing argument we have around here with respect to the proper treatment of authors who are listed as contributing “co-equally” to a given published paper. My position is that if we are to take this seriously, then it is perfectly fine* for the person listed second, third or eighth in the list of allegedly equal contributors to re-order the list on his or her CV. When I say this, my dear friend and ex-coblogger Comrade PhysioProffe loses his marbles and rants about how it is falsifying the AcademicRecord to do so. This plays into the story I have for you.

Up for your consideration today is an obscure paper on muramyl peptides and sleep (80 PubMed hits).

I ran across Muramyl peptides and the functions of sleep authored by one Richard Brown from The University of Newcastle in what appears to be a special issue of Behavioural Brain Research on The Function of Sleep (Volume 69, Issues 1–2, July–August 1995, Pages 85–90). The Preface to the issue indicates these Research Reports (on the original PDFs; termed Original Research Article on the online issue list; remember that now) arise from The Ravello Symposium on ‘The Function of Sleep’ held May 28-31, 1994.

So far so good. I actually ran across this article by clicking on an Addendum in the Jan 1997 issue. This Addendum indicates:

In the above paper an acknowledgement of unpublished data was omitted from the text during preparation. This omission could affect the future publication of the full set of data. Thus the author, Dr. Richard Brown, has agreed to share the authorship of the paper with the following persons: J. Andren, K. Andrews, L. Brown, J. Chidgey, N. Geary, M.G. King and T.K. Roberts.

So I tried to Pubmed Brown R and a few of the co-authors to see if there was any subsequent publication of the “full set of data” and….nothing. Hmmm. Not even the original offending article? So I looked for Brown R and sleep, muramyl, etc. Nada. Wow, well maybe for some reason the journal wasn’t indexed? No, because the first other article I looked for was there. Ok, weird. Next I searched for the journal date and month. Fascinatingly, PubMed lists these as “Review”. When the print PDFs say “Research Report” and the journal’s online materials list them as “Original Research Articles”.

But it gets better….scanning down the screen and …..Whoa!

Behav Brain Res. 1995 Jul-Aug;69(1-2):85-90. Muramyl peptides and the functions of sleep. Andren J, Andrews K, Brown L, Chidgey J, Geary N, King MG, Roberts TK. Department of Psychology, University of Newcastle, Australia.

Now this Richard Brown guy has been disappeared altogether from the author line! Without any obvious indication of this on the ScienceDirect access to the journal issue or article.

The PubMed record indicates there is an Erratum in Behav Brain Res 1997 Jan;82(2):245, but this is the Addendum I quoted above. Searching ScienceDirect for “muramyl peptides pulls up the original article and Addendum but no further indication of Erratum or correction or retraction.

Wow. So speaking to PP’s usual point about falsifying the academic record, this whole thing has been a clusterbork of re-arranging the “academic record”.

Moving along, the Web of Science indicates that the original, credited solely to Brown has been cited 9 times. First by the Addendum and then 8 more times after the correction…including one in 2011 and one in 2012. Who knows when the PubMed record was changed but clearly the original Addendum indicating credit should be shared was ignored by ISI and these citing authors alike.

The new version, with the R. Brown-less author line, has been cited 4 times. There are ones published in Jan 2008 and Sept 2008 and they indeed cite the R. Brown-less author list. So the two and possibly three most-recent citations of the R. Brown version have minimal excuse.

Okay, okay, obviously one would have to have done a recent database search for the article (perhaps with a reference management software tool) to figure out there was something wrong. But even so, who the heck would try to figure out why EndNote wasn’t finding it rather than just typing this single-author reference in by hand. After all, the pdf is right there in front of you…..clearly the damn thing exists.

This is quite possibly the weirdest thing I’ve seen yet. There must have been some determination of fraud or something to justify altering the Medline/PubMed record, right? There must have been some buyin from the journal Publisher (Elsevier) that this was the right thing to do.

So why didn’t they bother to fix their ScienceDirect listing and the actual PDF itself with some sort of indication as to what occurred and why these folks were given author credit and why Richard Brown was removed entirely?

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*The fact that nobody seems to agree with me points to the fact that nobody really views these as equal contributions one little bit.

h/t: EvilMonkey who used to blog at Neurotopia.