Fraud and Irresponsible Authorship

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To The Editor: To the discussion of fraud and irresponsible authorship by academicians and publishers, I would like to add another point of view: that of a reader. Although irresponsible authorship may facilitate fraud, I disagree that it is the more damaging offense. It is a nuisance to a reader, but fraud is destructive.

The escalation of multiple authors and bibliographic items in academic medicine seems, to an outsider, to be a charade that could be stopped without much difficulty. Petersdorf (1) is right that counting papers is easier than reading them, but the papers can be read. If Angell's