Non-existent authors.

Authorship of bioscientific papers is a serious business. Most journals have policies that encourage transparency, making it clear who did what, but some authors take it less seriously than editors might like, and indexers don’t always get it right. Searching for common abbreviations (⇓) in PubMed (1809–2017), Embase (1974–2017), Ovid Medline (1946–2017), Philosopher’s Index (1966–2016), and PsychINFO (1806–2017), I found three types of non-existent authors: apparent authors (such as Et Al and Anon), which conceal the identities of real contributors, depriving them of recognition; apparent authors whose “names” are postnominals, such as “Phil D”; and authors whose initials have been used as surnames and surnames as initials. Here I explore two of these categories in more detail, and discuss other forms of authorship. Et al and anon