Additional Terms and Licensing Details
Payment: Client agrees to pay for any services in accordance with the contract/professional services agreement governing the project. Unless otherwise specified all payments will be due and payable within thirty (30) days of the invoice date.
Confidentiality: Both parties each agree to maintain in confidence and not disclose to third parties any confidential information that is disclosed to one party by the other. This includes pricing information and all project communications.
REDCap Use: Per the “Terms of Use” for the “REDCap Non-Profit End-User License Agreement,” Vanderbilt University is the owner of all rights, title and interest in and to the Research Electronic Data Capture Software also known as “REDCap.” REDCap may be used for non-commercial research purposes only. If installed on portable devices, the source code must be encrypted to protect the software from unauthorized use or disclosure. Neither the software nor any derivative works may be distributed to or shared with any third party for any purpose. Please click here to view the full Terms of Use.
Attribution and Authorship
Attribution
If you used informatics services (e.g.: REDCap, NextGen Outback, GPC and PCORnet) or consultation was used for the research described in your manuscript, please contact us regarding appropriate attribution of grant support (e.g.: Greater Plains Collaborative contract, NIH Clinical and Translational Science awards).
If you used REDCap or i2b2, please cite their authors.
- Harris, Paul A., et al. “Research electronic data capture (REDCap)—a metadata-driven methodology and workflow process for providing translational research informatics support.” Journal of biomedical informatics 42.2 (2009): 377-381.
- 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. Decisions about authorship should be independent of consideration of funding sources. As recommended in published guidelines (Parker & Berman: Criteria for authorship for statisticians in medical papers. Statistics in Medicine 17: 2289-2299), “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 (2) 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 are the following:
- Facility/staff develop new methods to meet the project’s needs or combine existing techniques in a novel way.
- Facility/staff have a significant role in designing the study.
- Facility/staff write part of the manuscript other than a standard paragraph or two describing which methods were used.
- Facility/staff are asked to critique an initial draft and spend a considerable amount of time suggesting alternative wording and presentation of results.
- Facility/staff provide data analysis along with interpretation of results.
