Newsroom
Update on Authorship Criteria for the Behcet and Still Registries
Over the past few years, the AIDA Network has experienced an impressive expansion in the number of centers actively participating in patient recruitment across its registries. In particular, the registries dedicated to Behcet’s disease and Still’s disease have seen a remarkable increase in activity.
To ensure a fair and manageable attribution of authorship in upcoming Network publications, a small adjustment to the authorship criteria has become necessary.
Until now, authorship could be granted to all centers that had entered at least one patient in each registry. However, the current number of active centers now exceeds the maximum number of authors allowed by most journals, even when including only the Principal Investigators.
For this reason, a minimum threshold of recruited cases has been introduced for inclusion among the authors of papers related to the Behcet and Still registries. The new criteria are as follows:
- Adult patients: at least 6 patients entered in the Behcet registry and 6 in the Still registry.
- Pediatric patients: at least 3 patients entered in the Behcet registry and 6 in the Still registry.
These thresholds have been intentionally set very low so as to allow those who already have patients but have not yet entered them due to lack of time to easily meet them with minimal effort in terms of recruitment.
Centers that will have entered fewer patients than the specified thresholds at the time of manuscript submission will still be acknowledged for their contribution, with their respective PIs included in the Acknowledgements section.
Authorship for the other nine registries will, for the moment, remain all-inclusive, as the number of active centers is still compatible with the current publication limits. This will allow us to continue recognizing all participating centers, including those that may have faced greater challenges in recruitment activities.
Warm regards,
Luca Cantarini
Coordinator, AIDA Network