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Attribution

If you used informatics services (e.g. REDCap, HERON) or relied on consultation for the research described in your manuscript, you need to cite the support.

Citation Instructions 

    • Waitman LR, Warren JJ, Manos EL, Connolly DW. Expressing observations from electronic medical record flowsheets in an i2b2 based clinical data repository to support research and quality improvement. AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2011;2011:1454-63. PMID: 22195209 
    • Murphy SN, Weber G, Mendis M, Chueh HC, Churchill S, Glaser JP, Kohane IS. Serving the Enterprise and beyond with Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside (i2b2). J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2010;17(2):124-30. PMID:20190053. 

Authorship 

A frequently asked question is whether research methodology consultants and developers should be co-authors on scientific papers. Our perspective is aligned with other informatics and analytics centers at KU Medical Center. Decisions about authorship should be independent of consideration of funding sources, as recommended in published guidelines

The basis of financial support should be the time/effort spent on a project and the basis for authorship should be whether [the consultant] has made a scientific contribution to the project. If appropriate, it is often beneficial to include informaticians as authors in publications since those are considered as the most critical evidence of long-term informatics collaborations in most current grant funding reviews. 

By JAMA’s criteria for authorship for statistical experts involved in data analysis and interpretation, an analytical consultant is a co-author if: 

  1. he/she took part in the drafting of the manuscript, or  
  1. he/she was involved in a critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content.  

Above all, it is important for the researcher and informatics personnel working on the project to agree on criteria for authorship early in their collaboration. 

In cases where informatics core personnel contributed to the intellectual development of the project, provided analysis of the data beyond that which would have been otherwise possible for the investigator’s team, or authored any component of the text, authorship should be provided on the resulting manuscript or abstract.

Examples of scientific contributions 

  • Staff develop new methods to meet the project’s needs or combine existing techniques in a novel way. 
  • Staff have a significant role in designing the study. 
  • Staff write part of the manuscript other than a standard paragraph or two describing which methods were used. 
  • Staff are asked to critique an initial draft and spend a considerable amount of time suggesting alternative wording and presentation of results. 
  • Staff provide data analysis along with interpretation of results. 
Research Informatics

University of Kansas Medical Center
Research Informatics
Student Center, 3001C 
3901 Rainbow Boulevard
Kansas City KS 66160 
913-588-7251 

Research and Project Requests: dataconcierge@kumc.edu 
HERON and REDCap support: ocriosupport@kumc.edu