Leave the Ghostwriting to the Ouija Boards, Please

Today's New York Times has an excellent, and depressing, article by Duff Wilson and Natasha Singer headlined "Ghostwriting is Called Rife in Medical Journals".

You may argue about the adjective, "rife" -- according to the article, the percentage of ghostwritten articles in major medical publications ranges from 2 percent (Nature Medicine) to 11 percent (The New England Journal of Medicine), but it is nonetheless depressing.

"In the scientific literature," as Wilson and Singer note, "ghostwriting usually refers to medical writers, often sponsored by a drug or medical device company, who make major research or writing contributions to articles published under the names of academic authors. The concern ... is thtat the work of industry-sponsored writiers has the potential to introduce bias, affecting treatment decisions by doctors and, ultimately, patient care."

As you probably know by now, my mantra is "Transparency". I don't doubt that there are many highly ethical writers working for drug or medical device companies, who contribute considerable knowledge to published articles. My complaint is simply that I don't know about them.

According to the Times article, the study which revealed this flurry of ghosting was conducted by the editors of the Journal of the American Medical Association (aka JAMA), which posted an online questionnaire. The authors of more than 600 articles responded (anonymously); of those, approximately 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."

I'm not saying that all those contributors had nasty ulterior motives that they were hiding. But wouldn't you like to know if, say, it was a Pharma A company employee who was giving a glowing report to Pharma A's product? Maybe the product deserves that glowing report; maybe it doesn't. But you deserve to know about the reviewer.