Prior Authorship

This is a comment on a prior letter regarding authorship¹ that appeared in the June 1994 issue of the Archives regarding an article by Catalano and Biller.²

The original English description of the extended maxillotomy procedure was by Hernandez-Altemir of Zaragoza, Spain.³ He had previously published this technique in a Spanish journal in 1982 and 1983.^4,5 A scholarly review of all the world’s literature would have turned up this article by Hernandez-Altemir. Maybe then it would not have been reintroduced as a new procedure by three different studies.^1,6,7

This episode brings to mind several problems that are becoming more apparent to readers of the otolaryngology literature. Some of it may be related to our increasing reliance on computer literature searches. If the key words used in searches do not match with similar articles, these articles will be omitted in the search results. I think this