Biostatistics Research Support Center

Request for Biostatistics Support

The Biostatistics Research Support Center (BRSC) offers comprehensive statistical consultation and computational services to faculty, staff, and students in the College of Health Professions and throughout Temple University. BRSC personnel are available for discussion at all stages of research, including preparation of grants and contracts, assistance in analyzing and presenting research data, and statistical review of manuscripts in the publication process.

To utilize these services, please complete this form and submit it to Dr. Eugene Komaroff at:

 215-204-3721 939 Ritter Annex

  1. Investigator:
  2. Job Title or Student Status (program, degree):
  3. Research Supervisor (if applicable):
  4. Department:
  5. Telephone:
  6. Email Address:
  7. Type of funding available for consultation (none, grant, etc). Include cost center, if applicable:
  8. Brief outline of the study and problem:
  9. Research Question:
  10. Current stage of project (preparing grant proposal, data awaiting analysis, etc):
  11. Name and type (SAS, SPSS, Excel, etc) of dataset:
  12. Most urgent deadline (within a week, within a month, more than one month, etc):
  13. Intended research output (article in accredited journal, article in other journal, conference proceedings, conference poster, conference abstract, book or book chapter, technical report, other):
  14. If intended output will be submitted for publication, please provide details of the submission below (where, when, type of submission).

I have read the following guidelines on authorship. The authorship line will appear in anticipated submissions as follows:

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Type Investigator’s Name

Signature

Date

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Type Investigator’s Name

Signature

Date

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Guideline on Authorship for Collaborative Research

Involving Biostatistical Support

The purpose of this document is to clarify the expectations of statisticians involved in the design, analysis, or reporting of research studies at Temple University’s College of Health Professions. Specifically, it seeks to clarify expectations regarding authorship.

General Guidance

The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors has made the following statement concerning authorship [1]:

Authorship Requirements: Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content. One or more authors should take responsibility for the integrity of the work as a whole, from inception to published article. Authorship credit should be based only on (1) substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; and (2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and (3) final approval of the version to be published. Conditions 1, 2 and 3 must all be met.

The Council of Science Editors [1] and the NIH [2, 3] have made similar statements. For a more complete consideration of the topic of authorship, please refer to Macrina [4].

Additionally, the American Statistical Association’s “Ethical Guideline for Statistical Practice” states that statisticians have the following “Responsibilities in Publications and Testimony” [5]:

  1. Maintain personal responsibility for all work bearing your name; avoid undertaking work or coauthoring publications for which you would not want to acknowledge responsibility. Conversely, accept (or insist upon) appropriate authorship or acknowledgement for professional statistical contributions to research and the resulting publications or testimony.
  1. Report statistical and substantive assumptions made in the study.
  1. In publications or testimony, identify who is responsible for the statistical work if it would not otherwise be apparent.
  1. Make clear the basis for authorship order, if determined on grounds other than intellectual contribution. Preferably, authorship order in statistical publications should be by degree of intellectual contribution to the study and to the material to be published, to the extent that such ordering can feasibly be determined. When some other rule of authorship order is used in a statistical publication, the rule used should be disclosed in a footnote or endnote. (Where authorship order by contribution is assumed by those making decisions about hiring, promotion, or tenure, for example, failure to disclose an alternative rule may improperly damage or advance careers.)

Intellectual Property at Temple University

The following introduction may be found at

The Office of Technology Transfer (OTT) within the Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR) is responsible for protecting and commercializing the results of all research conducted at the University. Although this entails primarily patenting and licensing inventions developed entirely at the University, there are other important aspects of OTT’s activities For example, it is increasingly desirable to reserve, by contractual agreement in advance, the ownership of research results obtained by the University faculty in collaboration with colleagues at other universities. Additionally, it is necessary to protect not just intellectual property (the information contained in the research results), but also tangible property (the physical embodiment of the research results) such as laboratory notebooks, disks containing computer data or programs, as well as samples of novel chemical or biological materials.

As early as possible, the responsibility of the various research collaborators should be discussed and authorship should be clarified. As all the partied are committed to the success of the project, most difficulties may be avoided.

Exceptions

Payment or other compensation for statistical analysis does not exempt the statistician from authorship consideration.

In situations where the contribution of the statistician is minor, e.g. running a simple t-test with appropriate write-up, authorship is not justified. In cases such as this, both the researcher and the statistician should agree in advance on authorship expectations.

In situations where the researching statistician provides significant support for thesis publication, acknowledgment should be provided in the resulting document. Per the Graduate School of Temple University, copyright of the thesis is registered by the graduate student.

Position Statement

The researching statistician may be involved in any or all of the following: clarification of the study objective, study design, determining appropriate outcome measures or endpoints, writing the statistical analysis plan, performing statistical analyses, drafting the results, creating tables/figures/slides, final review of the product, and it is recommended that the final review and approval involve the contributing statistician.

Expectation

It is expected that the final product, whether it be an abstract, slide presentation, manuscript or otherwise, be reviewed by the contribution statistician for final approval. The statistician’s co-authorship on resultant publications is also expected in cases of non-trivial analytic support. As early as possible, the responsibility of the various research collaborators should be discussed and authorship should be clarified.

References

  1. International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, Uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals. Jama, 1997. 277(11): p. 927-34.
  2. Institute of Medicine Committee on the Responsible Conduct of Research, The responsible conduct of research in the health sciences. 1989, Washington, DC: National Academy of Science Press.
  3. NIH Committee on Scientific Conduct and Ethics, Guideline for the Conduct of Research at the National Institutes of Health. 1997.
  4. Macrina, F., Authorship and Peer Review, in Scientific Integrity: an Introductory Text with Cases, 2000.
  5. Committee on Professional Ethics, Guidelines for Statistical Practice. 1999, American Statistical Association.

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