Introducing a three-part series on medical journal ghostwriting

Gary Schwitzer, at HealthNewsReview.org, presents a three part series on medical journal ghostwriting.

Good overview on how to spot ghostwriting and two examples of how ghostwriting may introduce conflicts of interest and skewed results.

 

Academics ‘guest authoring’ ghostwritten medical journal articles should be charged with fraud, legal experts argue

From the 3 August 2011 Medical News Today article

ScienceDaily (Aug. 3, 2011) — Two University of Toronto Faculty of Law professors argue that academics who ‘lend’ their names, and receive substantial credit, as guest authors of medical and scientific articles ghostwritten by industry writers, should be charged with professional and academic misconduct and fraud, even if they contain factually correct information.

In an article published in PLoS Medicine, Professors Simon Stern and Trudo Lemmens argue “Guest authorship is a disturbing violation of academic integrity standards, which form the basis of scientific reliability.” In addition, “The false respectability afforded to claims of safety and effectiveness through the use of academic investigators risks undermining the integrity of biomedical research and patient care.”

In “Legal Remedies for Medical Ghostwriting: Imposing Fraud Liability on Guest Authors of Ghostwritten Articles,” Stern and Lemmens argue that since medical journals, academic institutions, and professional disciplinary bodies have not succeeded in enforcing effective sanctions, a more successful deterrence would be through the imposition of legal liability on the guest authors, “and may give rise to claims that could be pursued in a class action based on the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).”…

Read the entire news article
Journal Reference:
Simon Stern, Trudo Lemmens. Legal Remedies for Medical Ghostwriting: Imposing Fraud Liability on Guest Authors of Ghostwritten Articles. PLoS Medicine, 2011; 8 (8): e1001070 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1001070

Drug Maker Wrote Book Under 2 Doctors’ Names, Documents Say

Entire medical textbook written by pharmaceutical company …”a new level of chutzpah”

Excerpts from the November 2009 NY Times article

Two prominent authors of a 1999 book teaching family doctors how to treat psychiatric disorders provided acknowledgment in the preface for an “unrestricted educational grant” from a major pharmaceutical company.But the drug maker, then known as SmithKline Beecham, actually had much more involvement than the book described, newly disclosed documents show. The grant paid for a writing company to develop the outline and text for the two named authors, the documents show, and then the writing company said it planned to show three drafts directly to the pharmaceutical company for comments and “sign-off” and page proofs for “final approval.”

On a related note…Playing Doctor: How to Spin Pharmaceutical Research

An excerpt from this December 2010 Atlantic article

His first assignment was to produce scientific abstracts for studies of a newly approved antibiotic. Unfortunately, the antibiotic had a major weakness: it did not work against pneumococcus, one of the most common bugs a doctor will see. But this shortcoming was not something that the drug’s manufacturer— hich was funding the articles and abstracts—was keen to point out. So David and his fellow medical writers were told to avoid the topic.