Changing roles of the corresponding author - Consequences for the accessibility of medical information.

It appears that ever more frequently the corresponding author of a multi-author manuscript is not what he/she was originally supposed to be: the most involved researcher with the best overview concerning the presented study. Numerous journals now use the term 'corresponding author', however, for the author who acts as a kind of secretary for the submitted manuscript, irrespective of his/her expertize in the subject. Another problem is that a significant number of universities give more scientific credits to the corresponding author than to his/her co-authors, which fairly commonly results in granting the corresponding authorship to the student or young scientist who needs scientific credits most urgently for his/her academic career.

Keeping medical science trustworthy: The threat by predatory journals.

Since most scientific journals tend to ask article processes costs from authors, a new category of journals has developed of which the business model is commonly exclusively based on financial contributions by authors. Such journals have become known as predatory journals. The financial contributions that they ask are not always lower than those asked by high-quality journals although they offer less: there is commonly no real review, texts are not edited, and there are commonly no printed editions.

Rest is essential for effective therapies, and so it is for preparing a manuscript.

Numerous medical articles are commented upon. This suggests that their scientific quality is insufficient. This need not be the case, however: most comments regard the presentation of the data, the conclusions or lacking information in the discussion.

Hardly traceable pitfalls in medical review articles.

The main purpose of review articles is to increase insight into the best possible practice for increasing the health condition of future subjects. This requires the collection of as many relevant data as possible from earlier case studies, but such data should be mutually independent. If the data from the reviewed single- or multi-case studies are not entirely mutually independent, the conclusions of the review study may easily - though not necessarily - become biased.