Grassley compares ghostwriting, plagiarism
Filed under: Conflicts of interest, Government, Pharmaceuticals, Studies
Sen/ Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) continues his investigation of “medical ghostwriting” with a letter to 10 medical schools asking “what they are doing about professors who put their names on ghostwritten articles in medical journals — and why that practice was any different from plagiarism by students.”
Sen. Charles Grassley
At issue is the practice in which a writer — sometimes paid by a pharmaceutical or other involved company — works on an article intended for publication without being named while a less-involved researcher receives credit.
Journals, medical associations and even pharmaceutical companies have called for an end to the practice but medical schools have been slower to respond.
Grassley has asked the medical schools to explain their policies on ghostwriting and plagiarism, to list complaints and describe investigations into both practices.
Ghostwriting: Journals’ dirty, not-so-little secret
Filed under: Conflicts of interest, Health data, Health journalism, Hot Health Headline, Studies
The New York Times‘ Duff Wilson and Natasha Singer reported the results of a Journal of the American Medical Association study showing that, in an anonymous survey of contributors to six major medical journals, 7.8 percent “acknowledged contributions to their articles by people whose work should have qualified them to be named as authors on the papers but who were not listed.”
Reuters Health’s Brendan Borrell describes the lengths one editor goes to when trying to track down ghostwriters and disclose them in his journal’s articles.
Meanwhile, an editorial in the nonprofit open-access Public Library of Science’s PLoS Medicine calls upon journals to “get serious” in the war against ghostwriting.
Wyeth paid university for ghostwritten articles
Filed under: Health journalism, Hot Health Headline, Public records, Studies
John Fauber and Meg Kissinger of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found that Wyeth paid the University of Wisconsin to sponsor “ghostwritten medical education articles that downplayed the risks” of female hormone therapy - one of that company’s most notorious missteps.
Amid mounting concern regarding their safety and shortly before the discovery that Wyeth’s progestin and estrogen products were considered dangerous enough to bring a massive clinical trial screeching to a halt, five ghostwritten articles, paid for by Wyeth, were used in University of Wisconsin continuing medical education materials which promoted the benefits and downplayed the risks of the treatments.
The Wyeth company line is that the articles weren’t bad or misrepresented science, and that the titular authors of the pieces were given “substantial editorial control” over the “scientifically accurate content.”
William Heisel focused on DesignWrite (the ghostwriters behind Wyeth’s pieces) and suggested that reporters check out their own local institutions and ask questions about where money is coming from, ask if the big names of local scientists are helping to hide their dubious connections and to actively question the impartiality of the science itself.
Heisel also put together an entertaining piece regarding just how tickled some researchers are to put their name on ghostwritten work.
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