Who and what
The modern exponential increase of scientific information in medicine has been accompanied by a distressing decline in skepticism. The growth of science owes much to Bacon's warning against uncritical acceptance of authoritative opinion, yet, paradoxically, in present-day medicine the voice of authority, as a result of the electronic revolution and the jet airplane, is louder and more broadly cast than ever. Who says what, is more important than what is said.
There are objective indicators of the increasing "personalization" of evidence. For example, the increasing attention paid to the identity of authors can be seen in the trend of the count of names credited to each original article published in Pediatrics over the past 26 years(fig.1).
