White (2018) maintains that an appraisal of research literature should include an appraisal of
the quality of authorship, which may include, “cited credentials, affiliations and known
expertise in the health discipline on the research topic” (p.12). The authorship of the study
being appraised in this paper (Tailor et al, 2019), comprised four authors who had a Bachelor of
medical laboratory science, and one who was a qualified dentist, affiliated with universities. It
can therefore be concluded that the authorship was a strength of this study, given cited
credentials, qualifications and affiliations. However, a weakness of this study was the omission
of a disclosure statement in the study, indicating that there was no ‘conflict of interest’. A
conflict of interest is described by White (2018, p. 6) as a situation when there are commercial,
legal, financial, or any other opposing interests that may affect the study.