Development of a scoring system for Author placement in Manuscript writing

Abstract Background and objectives:The author placement in a manuscript should reasonably correspond to their contribution to the work. Despite its importance, author placement had been done arbitrarily without objectivity. This study aims to study the importance, and contributions of an author in a collaborative research based on their placement as well as to develop a scoring system for authorship order. Hopefully this would provide a structured method of proposing authorship order in a scientific manuscript. Methods:A sequential mixed qualitative and quantitative method was used with consecutive sampling of 100participants. Key informant interviews were conducted on importance, credibility and parts of a research/manuscript writing process. A 14-item step for generation of a manuscript was developed which was given to researchers to score 1-5 based on importance. Manual analysis was used for qualitative part, while quantitative data analysis was done with IBM SPSS-22. The mean+ SD Score of each item was obtained and percentage agreement calculated. Results:There was a uniform list of various parts to develop a manuscript from start to publishing. Conceptualization of study, preparation of manuscript, received scores 5 and 4.4 while financial contribution, analysis of results, proof reading/editing of manuscript were scored 1 respectively.All participants scored same for conceptualization(score 5) and financial contribution(score1). Conclusion:Conceptualization of study and preparation of manuscripts had the largest scores for placements of authors, while financial contribution; proof reading/editing of manuscripts and data analysis had the least scores. Proper placement for authors in manuscript writing using this guide is thereby recommended.