Medical progress has always been directly related to scientifi c publications. Publication is the end point of research which permits universal dissemination of research fi ndings and conclusions. If research, … is not published, it does not exist. Although this might seem like a truism, the current criteria for what constitutes authorship has been built gradually through debate. Complete uniformity in this respect has not yet been reached, and not all editorial boards of scientifi c journals have explicit concepts on this subject. A committee consisting of the editors of prestigious medical journals has proposed conditions to be met by people who appear as authors of scientifi c publications and have proposed an order in which authors should appear. Similarly, they have proposed that for multicenter studies which involve a large number of contributors, the real authors should be made clear and should be clear in the order that authors are listed as well in the fi nal document. It should be stated without any ingenuousness that practices may exist that corrupt the process of authorship or make it fraudulent and which therefore threaten the credibility of research.