We present a criterion that provides an easy sufficient condition in order that a collection of Abelian integrals has the Chebyshev property. This condition involves the functions in the integrand of the Abelian integrals and can be checked, in many cases, in a purely algebraic way. By using this criterion, several known results are obtained in a shorter way and some new results, which could not be tackled by the known standard methods, can also be deduced.