Irresponsible Authorship

Excerpt

To the editor: Your recent article on authorship (1) fails to address adequately the issue of incomplete authorship. I contend that the omission of authors who had responsibility for critical content of a paper, instead of being a rare occurrence, is a rather common event in university medical settings. I have found it to be a typical abuse of senior research assistants and senior technical staff whose contributions range from important changes in study design, to development of analysis protocols, to literature analysis (as opposed to article gathering). Frequently, these persons are excluded on the basis of their lack of