While an average of 2 authors per article used to be the norm in academic publishing until the 1960s, multi-authorship is now common in scientific articles. The emergence of this phenomenon seems natural considering the current system of incentives for researchers and the greater ease of collaboration thanks to advances in technology. However, this has also led to some authorship-related issues, as discussed in the paper (https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.1997.03550070071041) published by Dr. Drummond Rennie and his colleagues in the Journal of the American Medical Association. In their article, they state that “the system of authorship has become inappropriate as the average number of authors of an article has increased; as the work of coauthors has become more specialized and relationships between them have become more complex; and as both credit and, even more, responsibility have become obscured and diluted. Credit and accountability cannot be assessed unless the contributions of those named as authors are disclosed to readers, so the system is flawed.” In order to address this problem, it is necessary to devise a more effective and suitable system to represent the varying degrees of contributions to publications. Rather than merely listing all the names of the authors involved, it is necessary to have a defined set of terms describing various contributor roles and mechanisms, which would allow authors to take credit or be held accountable for their work in a more specific manner.