The pre-publication history for this paper can be accessed here: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2288/12/62/prepub wouldulikeike to acknowledge all the authors of the original studies, as well as collaborating authors of the two reviews.
We will also propose a timetable and a publication policy, including a list of anticipated publications, with a collaborative group authorship for these publications, to be discussed and agreed upon by all collaborating authors.
A group of collaborating authors with complementary expertise in environmental toxicology, nutritional epidemiology, aquatic ecology, economics, and public health practice together defined the outline and scope of this study.
Furthermore, the degree of international collaboration based on co-author relationships was considerable, with US-based authors collaborating with authors in 41 different countries on a total of 243 papers.
The collaborating authors administered surveys during a single routinely scheduled teaching conference at each of their respective institutions in the final month of the academic year in 2005.
A survey (see Appendix 1) comprising 20 questions (11 multiple-choice and 9 true/false) was developed by the collaborating authors and reviewed for face and content validity.
In all phases of the study any uncertainty as to classification or indexing of information was discussed with the collaborating authors.
This is an important study, providing interesting answers to questions raised by previous work from the collaborating authors' labs; why does the enzyme require ATP and what does the ribonucleotide do for the synthesis.
Moreover, MEA authors mainly collaborated with authors from the United States of America, India, United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, China, France, Japan, and Malaysia.
From this result we can conclude that when an author collaborates with central authors with a high closeness, then this researcher also increases his own closeness to all other authors in the network.
