Understanding International Differences in Academic Author Order in General Medicine Publications

With increasing multinational research in general medicine, the lack of a standardized policy regarding the order of author bylines can create conflict and misunderstanding due to different practices worldwide.

We examined publicly available data from websites such as Journal Citation Reports and Web of Science, focusing on original articles published in the "Medicine, General, & Internal" category in 2020. Of 169 journals in the "Medicine, General, & Internal" category, we selected the ten countries with the highest number of publications and then examined the position of the corresponding author in the author byline as an indicator of the author in charge since corresponding authors are considered to have contributed the most.

The top ten countries with the highest publications are the USA, China, Germany, England, Japan, France, Italy, Canada, India, and Australia. The results demonstrated that the percentage of the second author being the corresponding author was the highest in Japan compared to other countries. This percentage was 25 times higher in Japan than in the USA.

Understanding international differences regarding author order would facilitate smoother collaboration.