Healthy Skepticism Library item: 16834

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Publication type: news

Wilson D
Medical Schools Quizzed on Ghostwriting
The New York Times 2009 Nov 17
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/18/business/18ghost.html

Full text:

Senator Charles E. Grassley wrote to 10 top medical schools Tuesday to ask 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.

Mr. Grassley, of Iowa, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, sent the letters as part of his continuing investigation of so-called medical ghostwriting. The term refers to publication of medical journal articles in which an outside writer – sometimes paid by a drug or medical devices company whose product is being studied – has done extensive work on the article without being named on the publication. Instead, one or more academic researchers may receive author credit.

Mr. Grassley said ghostwriting had hurt patients and raised costs for taxpayers because it used prestigious academic names to promote medical products and treatments that might be expensive or less effective than viable alternatives.

“Any attempt to manipulate the scientific literature, which can in turn mislead doctors to prescribe treatments that may be ineffective and/or cause harm to their patients, is very troubling,” the senator wrote.

Some journals, medical associations, writers’ and editors’ groups and pharmaceutical companies themselves have called for crackdowns on ghostwriting. But some universities that employ the professors who put their names on the articles have been slow to respond. Merck, Wyeth (now part of Pfizer), GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca are among the companies accused by lawyers and investigators of providing ghostwriters for research papers.

Mr. Grassley asked the universities to describe their policies on both ghostwriting and plagiarism and to enumerate complaints and describe investigations into both practices since 2004.

Dr. Ross McKinney Jr., director of the Trent Center for Bioethics at Duke University, said faculty who took credit for a ghostwritten paper should suffer the same penalties as students who plagiarized.

“But it is a very, very difficult thing to prove, just as it turns out that plagiarism is hard to prove,” he said in an interview.

Mr. Grassley’s letters went to the top medical schools for research as ranked by U.S. News and World Report this year, in order: Harvard, Johns Hopkins, the University of Pennsylvania, Washington University in St. Louis, University of California, San Francisco, Duke, Stanford, the University of Washington, Yale and Columbia.

Most of them already have policies against ghostwriting or honorary authorship of research papers, a review of their Web sites shows.

Harvard Medical calls the practices “deplorable.” Duke says, “Severe and/or repeated offenses will result in formal disciplinary action.”

Arthur L. Caplan, director of the Penn’s Center for Bioethics, said there was a difference in degree, if not in kind, between ghostwriting and plagiarism. Faculty members who sign their names to ghostwritten papers for research credit usually have some agreement with the paper, he said, even if, improperly, they did not write it. Students who plagiarize a paper may know nothing about the subject.

“Ghostwriting and plagiarism, they’re on a continuum,” Mr. Caplan said. “They’re related. I wouldn’t say they’re twins, but they’re cousins.”

Mr. Grassley’s letter highlighted the disparate treatment of students and professors who claimed authorship of a paper that was not their own.

“Students are disciplined for not acknowledging that a paper they turned in was written by somebody else,” Mr. Grassley wrote. “But what happens when researchers at the same university publish medical studies without acknowledging that they were written by somebody else?”

The medical schools were asked to answer the questions by Dec. 8.