Difficulties of clinical research in Romania

Not long ago, in Romania, only a single article published as main author in a journal with impact factor was promoted to the highest university medical degree. Nowadays, when research is so neglected, and doctors researchers are so fewer, demands are much higher, trying to compare us with research physicians from economically developed countries. In Romania, all of the medical doctors abandoned the research and went to the healthcare sector. The only places where medical research is done are medical universities, which unfortunately constitute a cartel that blocks researchers outside of this system. We believe that medical research should not only belong to universities, since there are researchers doctors. The latter have no facility to be able to organize a research, even though they are in an institute and have the same professional degree like doctors in universities.

Another difficulty is the fact that any physician may be the principal investigator in a study. Doctors who do not have a scientific career can lead as principal investigators and research professors are subinvestigators, leading to disregard of these professional and virtually these professional grades are canceled.

If we look at the way of writing articles, we realize that many of them do not real­ly have any relevance to the authors’ research contribution. Thus, if the article is the result of an international clinical trial (the most common case), the first author is the one who introduced more cases in the study than the one who did the study design. Subsequently, the “writers” employed by the sponsors of the study write the text and the “authors” approve this text. For these reasons I think that the entire impact factor of the journal should be given to the personality who is considered to give the scientific gist of the paper, and the other authors to receive half of the impact factor of the journal.

This situation was revealed in many publications, and I stop at two of them: “Given that there is no uniform rule about author order, readers may find it difficult to assess the nature of an author’s contribution to a research project. To address this issue, some journals, especially medical ones, insist on detailed author contributions notes. However, even this tactic does little to counter how strongly citation rules have enhanced the attention of first-named authors receive” (https://wordvice.com/journal-article-author-orde). 

“Criteria for authorship have been discussed at length, because of the inflationary increase in the number of authors on papers submitted to biomedical journals and the practice of ‘gift’ authorship, but a simple way to determine credit associated with the sequence of authors’ names is still missing” (http://www.councilscienceeditors.org).

I hope that the ministry of education and research and the ministry of health will reorganize the research and put the doctors researchers in the place they deserve.