ABSTRACT
Authors have been authoring articles, books, plays, and poems for millennia. And though authorship may at times have been contested, there was usually no problem in assigning responsibility. Collaborations have been extraordinarily fruitful, but the darker side has become apparent. In the clinical literature, the practice of substituting the names of prominent clinical researchers for those of the pharmaceutical company employees who actually wrote the articles has become widespread. Professional rules against, say, sexual relations between physicians and their patients, or against harassing juniors, do not eliminate such relations or such harassment. The reality is that for those who have gone through the act of sitting down with their colleagues, while each says what their own contribution has been, has been found to be a salutory exercise.
