Abuses of Authorship

Excerpt

Irresponsible authorship has many forms. The most serious is fraud, exemplified by the Darsee affair (1, 2). Perhaps no other event in recent medical publishing has drawn such attention in the scientific and popular press (3, 4). The irony of the Darsee affair is that far more frequent though less dramatic abuses of authorship draw little notice in the scientific community, let alone public concern. This unconcern is no surprise; a murder gets more attention than a mugging. But the editors of this journal have seen enough minor abuses through the past two or three years to provoke our concern