We have entered an age that requires transparency in our professional activities. Editors, who share responsibility for the integrity of the medical literature, seek transparency in submitted manuscripts by requiring disclosure of the financial interests of authors and seek information that may be relevant about funding, industry involvement, which authors had access to full data, and several other components. One area that has become more convoluted in recent years is the evolving concept of who wrote the manuscript, especially in multicenter clinical trials or complex multidisciplinary research projects in which hundreds of people may have been involved and for which the assistance of professional writers may have been used.