© 2016 International Journal of Educational and Psychological Researches | Published by Wolters Kluwer - Medknow 224 A comparative study on authorship trends in four Persian and English Journals in the field of Medical Education Alireza Yousefy, Mohammad Fakhari Department of Medical Education, Medical Education Research Center, Isfahan University of Medical Science, Isfahan, Iran Introducion Professional behavior is a critical issue among the scientific researchers. Researchers must consider the ethical issues in their research fields. The issue of authorship is one of the many potential conflicts of interests in most of the research fields. [1] In the related literature, some guidelines are introduced for overcoming this ongoing challenge. The uniform requirements for manuscripts protocol developed by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors contain the known guidelines for defining the role of authorship and contributor ship in Biomedical Journals. [2] Accordingly, in scientific articles, each author must have substantial contributions to research conception and design, acquisition and interpretation of data, drafting the article, and final approval of submitted article. [3] Recently, the number of authors per scientific articles has followed an increasing trend. For instance, in journals regarding plastic surgery, the number of authors per article has doubled in the recent 30 years. [4] Regarding Emergency Medical Journals, the number of authors per article has doubled from 1975 to 1995 while the numbers of pages have remained in the range of 4–6. [5] ABSTRACT Context: The authorship issue is a major ethical challenge for professional researchers. Authorship trend is an indirect indicator of professional manner regarding the Medical Education researchers. Aims: This study is conducted to compare the trends of authorship in four high impact journals in the ield of Medical Education. Materials and Methods: The authorship trends of two high impact English Journals in Medical Education:The Medical Teacher and the Medical Education versus the two high impact Persian Journals in Medical Education:The Strides in Development of Medical Education Journal and the Iranian Journal of Medical Education (IJME) are compared in this study. Statistical analysis was performed using IBM SPSS version 19, Minitab version 17 and Excel add-in Megastat version 10.1 software. Results: The authorship trends of 6699 articles in the four journals of concern are analyzed. Over the past 12 years, the mean number of authors has increased in both the Persian and one of the English Journals. The trend lines of single authored articles in the English Journals and the IJME decreased in a signiicant manner. However, in the Persian Journals, the percentage of single-author articles is obviously lower than the English Journals. Conclusion: The increasing number of authors per article could be considered as a sign of increased collaborative research or authorship misconducts in this ield. Further research is recommended to study the causes and contributing factors in the increasing trend of authorship in the Persian Journals. Key words: Authorship, Iran, Medical Education, medical ethics Original Article Address for Correspondence: Dr. Mohammad Fakhari, Department of Medical Education, Medical Education Research Center, Isfahan University of Medical Science, Isfahan, Iran. E-mail: fakharedc@gmail.com Access this article online Quick Response Code: Website: www.ijeprjournal.org DOI: 10.4103/2395-2296.189673 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License, which allows others to remix, tweak, and build upon the work non-commercially, as long as the author is credited and the new creations are licensed under the identical terms. For reprints contact: reprints@medknow.com How to cite this article: Yousefy A, Fakhari M. A comparative study on authorship trends in four Persian and English Journals in the ield of Medical Education. Int J Educ Psychol Res 2016;2:224-8. [Downloaded free from http://www.ijeprjournal.org on Saturday, May 12, 2018, IP: 188.136.149.34]