- Gail A Van Norman: Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine, University of Washington, UWMC 1959 NE Pacific Street, Seattle, WA 98195, USA. Electronic address: gvn@uw.edu.
The medical literature guides ethical clinical care by providing information on medical innovations, clinical care, the history of medical advances, explanations for past mistakes and inspiration for future discoveries. Ethical authorship practices are thus imperative to preserving the integrity of medical publications and fulfilling our obligations to ethical patient care. Unethical authorship practices such as plagiarism, guest authorship, and ghost authorship are increasing and pose serious threats to the medical literature. The rise of artificial intelligence in assisting scholarly work poses particular concerns. Authors may face severe and career-changing penalties for engaging in unethical authorship.