Ghostwriting: Research Misconduct, Plagiarism, or Fool’s Gold?
Traditionally, personal integrity and professional accountability have guaranteed appropriate authorship of biomedical journal articles. However, recent controversies, including exposés of ghostwriting and guest authorship, have shown the fallibility of this trust.
Ghostwriting, the practice whereby individuals make significant contributions to writing a manuscript but are not named as authors, invariably goes hand-in-hand with guest or honorary authorship, whereby named authors have not contributed sufficiently to a manuscript to merit authorship. Although ghostwriting and guest authorship are prevalent, and remain as common today as they were a decade ago,(1) the actual extent of ghostwriting in biomedical journals remains unknown.(2)
These practices are thought predominantly to occur when academic investigators collaborate with industry. However, they also occur within purely academic collaborations when, for example, senior academics supervising or supporting research are included as authors, regardless of their contributions, or when junior academics are asked to draft articles for senior academics, who are then listed as first author. Increasingly, academics also are using external medical writers to facilitate manuscript writing and preparation.(3)
Nevertheless, more typically, an industry-employed or contracted writer prepares a complete draft of a review or research article for an academic partner, usually an expert in his or her field. The academic then submits the manuscript, perhaps after editing, and in turn receives an honorarium for his or her time and effort. Of note, the named academic authors rarely have access to actual clinical data for independent analysis and only participate once the manuscript has been drafted, after key decisions have already been made, including which analyses to conduct and which findings to disseminate.
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— Xavier Bosch, MD, PhD, Joseph S. Ross, MD, MHS
This article originally appeared in April 2012 issue of The American Journal of Medicine.
