A standardized method for determination of who should be listed as authors on scholarly papers.

A handy method is described of selecting among the inevitable onslaught of 100 to 200 potential coauthors that mysteriously appear whenever a journal article is submitted for publication. The "relative authorship weighting scale" helps to decide who actually qualifies as an author and serves as an objective means of determining the appropriate order in which these various goldbrickers should be listed on the manuscript.