Equal authorship for equal authors: personal experience as an equal author in twenty peer-reviewed medical publications during the last three years.

To the editor, Authors’ contributions to medical publications are semi-quantitatively assessed by order of authorship, with earlier listed authors generally having increasingly important contributions. Standard medical indexes, such as PubMed or MEDLINE, uniformly list authors of publications in peer-reviewed journals sequentially, without provision for designating equal authorship for equal contributors. This omission can discriminate against the second of equal authors, who is viewed as a lesser contributing author. This letter analyzes this problem and proposes an equitable solution, based on personal experience with twenty publications during the last three years. This work received an exemption/approval by the William Beaumont Hospital Institutional Review Board on January 11, 2016.