¿Quién es autor? Las autorías múltiples, criterios y lineamientos

This paper aims are: 1. Highlighting the most common unethical practices regarding authorship in scientific publications, 2. Tracing authorship criteria from most respectful academic sources and 3. Making recommendations to deal with multiple authored papers. To achieve this, a review was made on those articles obtained through a search on Pubmed and Scopus databases with the terms “authorship”, “authorship guidelines” and “multiple authors”. From this, the more common unethical practices and the most acknowledged sources of guidelines were identified, most of them coming from relevant medical associations: International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), Council Science Editors (CSE), The World Association of Medical Editors (WAME), National Institutes of Health (NIH), The American Psychological Association (APA) y The Center for Values, Ethics and the Law in Medicine, Sidney University – VELiM (SEH). Given that most of those guidelines are inapplicable in practice, a more complete view is needed, where all the parts involved will take some responsibility. It is required that financial organizations, scientific institutions, publisher, editors and researchers take some action to assure research quality and true information, without metrics interference.