A dangerous tendency manifested in the presentation of the results of gas chromatographic (GC)–mass spectrometric (MS) identification of components of complex mixtures of organic compounds is discussed. The number of publications containing unacceptable identification results has been increasing, especially within the last few years. The main signs of this are the absence of correspondence between the orders of elution of identified compounds and the general principles of chromatographic retention, which is attributed to unreliable chemical origin of the analytes, reporting of incorrect chemical names, erroneous chromatographic retention indices (RIs), and so on. The most effective and most convenient criterion for revealing such errors is checking the order of chromatographic elution of analytes by comparison with reference or predicted RIs. The contemporary practice of presenting the results of GC-MS identification of constituents of complex multicomponent mixtures accepted in most journal publications involves listing the multitude of identified compounds, supplemented with minimal sets of analytical parameters. Besides the names of compounds (the use of trivial names is traditionally preferred), these sets most often include GC RIs or absolute retention times (tR) of analytes, supplemented sometimes by their molecular weights and the mass numbers of the most intense peaks in their mass spectra (reduced MS information). The complete mass spectra are presented rather seldom because of objective restrictions on the length of publications in most journals. Because of the last restriction, important auxiliary MS information, e.g., spectral library match values, is omitted rather often. If this restriction is avoided (like it is in reports, dissertations, etc.), the complete mass spectra can be presented not only in numerical form, but even in graphical form. The presentation of part of the data on the Internet in the form of socalled supplementary materials, as recommended in some journals, improves the possibilities to check the results presented. The practice of creating a database of GC RIs [1–3] implies the search for retention data in all available literature sources. The main part of this work is the careful evaluation of data reliability, followed by revealing and excluding suspicious and/or erroneous RIs. The highly “compressed” form in which the results of GC-MS identification are presented in the current literature implies special demands be placed on their correctness. In connection with this, the appearance of a dangerous tendency of presenting unacceptable results of GC-MS identification should be taken into account. Unfortunately, the number of publications that are “suspicious” in relation to this tendency has been rising quickly, especially during the last few years. The aim of this communication is (1) to fix this tendency and (2) to discuss its possible reasons and consequences. Some simple rules are proposed to reveal the errors in the presentation of the results of GC-MS identification of constituents of complex mixtures and/or how to avoid them.