The dissemination of the practice of collaborative authorship (coauthorship) in Brazil and in the international scientific community has been accompanied by an increasing occurrence of frauds, manipulations and other deviations in the assignment of responsibility for a scientific paper. This article discusses the criteria for authorship attribution, the reasons for the growing indices of coauthorship and the challenges to determine authorship in electronic journals. Through literature review and case study (bibliographic search in scientific database), it shows ways to avoid that "misbehaviors" related to the authorship attribution affect the credibility of science.