A tongue-in-cheek method described in 1969 by Paul Davis, MD, and Robert Gregerman, MD, “in response to the burgeoning problems of multiauthorship of papers and perceived logarithmic differences (PLDs) in the quality of published papers. The parse analysis assigned decimal values to the real contributions of investigators to a multiauthored paper – e.g., 0.04 or 0.37. The rationale was that embarrassingly low parse values . . . assigned to negligibly contributory authors would defeat the trend toward multiauthorship that emerged in the 1960s. When parse values and levels of statistical significance were regrettably confused in the subsequent scientific literature, many authors came to associate really low parse values with significant achievement.