Ethical considerations relating to writing a medical scientific paper for publication.

Unethical practices are not unusual in medical scientific articles, but they are not always recognized as being unethical. The author discusses both obvious unethical behavior, such as fraud, plagiarism, and conflict of interest, and a number of other practices, such as errors in citations, misuse of statistics, and wasteful publication, which are more widespread and generally accepted, but which may be considered unethical. Increased awareness of these issues could reduce the extent of these practices.