Background:The characteristics of authorship involve a combination of number of authors, names and qualifications, institutional affiliations, order or sequence, and many other types of authorship misconduct namely the ghost authorship and gifted authorship. Objective: To descriptively summarize the studies on analysis of authorship and explore the existing evidence through articles indexed in PubMed. Methods: Systematic search of literature in PubMed was done using keywords “authorship”[Title] AND (trend[Title] OR trends[Title] OR analysis[Title] OR reporting[Title])” were used in the search tab, for obtaining all types of articles published in English, with available abstracts indexed until October 2012. Mutual consensus method was utilized after blinded independent search by two reviewers using a pre-decided checklist for data extraction and synthesis. Descriptive analytical approach was used to describe the data from the included studies. Results: Of the 32 included articles, there were four types of analyses- specialty based (N=21, 66%), journal-based (N=6, 19%), practice-based (N=2, 6%) and research-based (N=3, 9%). Of the 21 specialty-based articles, medicine (N=5, 23.8%) and dentistry (N=3, 14.3%) were more represented. 23 articles were on single characteristic, and 9 were on multiple characteristics, and the number of authors (11/23, 48%) and authorship criteria (5/23, 22%) were more commonly reported among the former type. Conclusion: Specialty-based analyses of authorship was more common, with more articles in the field of medicine and dentistry, and were more on analyzing a single characteristic such as number of authors or authorship criteria.