In its April Editorial, Nature Genetics (41, 383; 2009) addresses the issue of contributor attribution in PubMed, the index provided by the US National Library of Medicine (NLM) and used by many researchers to navigate tens of millions of biomedical publications dating back to 1948.

Nature Genetics, in common with many other journals, regularly receives queries from authors about how to format their manuscripts so that authors are correctly credited. As stated in the Editorial, “The short answer is that authors must be listed in the paper’s byline (the author list under the title) or identified elsewhere in the paper as authors to appear as authors in PubMed. PubMed curators can also identify and index consortium collaborators identified as such within the paper. If contributors are listed as consortium members, but not identified as authors, they will appear in PubMed only as collaborators.”

But the questions don’t stop there. Journals are increasingly being asked about how authors can ensure “equal authorship” is represented in PubMed or why the email address for the corresponding author does not always appear in PubMed, for example. Journals provide this type of information as XML tags (‘metadata’), but what happens to it when it reaches its destination?

Authors need to be able to provide documentation of their roles in their consortium papers to funders for grants and to committees for career advancement. So that journals can provide this information consistently, unique author-controlled identifiers will need to be universally adopted and linked in publisher metadata. Nature Genetics suggests that instead of being controlled by any organization, “even one as central to everyday research as NLM’s invaluable indexing service”, there needs to be “agreed conventions that allow authors and third-party indices to offer distributed solutions for different applications. All of these solutions would be fed by the metadata provided by authors with their word processors and by publishers with their tagging schemas.”

The Editorial continues: “Our recommendation is that PubMed should leave the publisher-supplied metadata as it is supplied if it has ambitions to provide the more detailed author affiliations that authors frequently ask us about. Authors, please think whether you would welcome the wider adoption of existing technical conventions that allow universal and distributed appreciation of your growing reputation, or whether you would rather continue to muddle along trying to extract a reputation from the slowly-evolving customs of a national central library. Whatever solution we end up with, we should keep clear the distinctions between research data collection, analysis and writing.”