Healthy Skepticism Library item: 7358

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Journal Article

Jirik K.
How Great Researchers Get By-lines, Get Paid, and Get Medicine in Trouble
Bioethics Forum 2006 Dec 28;
http://www.bioethicsforum.org/plagiarism-in-medical-research.asp

Full text:

Fraud, plagiarism, intellectual dishonesty: it’s rampant in our society at the moment. Oprah gets conned by James Frey and has to apologize to her viewers. Jack Kelley scams readers of USA Today and Karen Jurgensen, the editor, precipitously retires in response. Jayson Blair fabricates stories for the New York Times and both the executive editor, Howell Raines, and the managing editor, Gerald Boyd, resign. JT Leroy is a total fabrication that takes in thousands. Little, Brown and Company are forced to withdraw Harvard University student Kaavya Viswanathan’s book, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life, over claims of plagiarism.

Thank goodness this type of fraud has not permeated the hallowed halls of academia. No university presidents have been forced to resign or retire because of unethical behavior by their academic researchers. Instead, as in the case of Aubrey Blumsohn, a senior medical professor of Sheffield University in Britain who protested potential fraud, the universities simply offer to pay out hush money to conceal the fraud.

What kind of fraud could possibly involve academic researchers and universities? The answer is the ghostwriting of research articles that appear in reputable medical journals. Let’s be very clear about our definition of ghostwriting. It’s not about substantial editorial assistance for researchers for whom English is not their first language. It’s not about articles that have multiple authors, some of whom worked on only small parts of the research project. It’s also not about honorary authorship, although it is related. Ghostwritten, as defined here, is when an article is written by one person, often someone working directly or indirectly for a pharmaceutical company, and a second person, often a well-known academic researcher, is paid for letting his or her name appear on the by-line, concealing the article’s origin. According to recent studies in JAMA and the British Journal of Psychiatry, somewhere between 11% and 50% of articles on pharmaceuticals that appear in the major medical journals are thought to be ghostwritten…