What Should Be Done To Tackle Ghostwriting in the Medical Literature?

Background to the debate: Ghostwriting occurs when someone makes substantial contributions to a manuscript without attribution or disclosure. It is considered bad publication practice in the medical sciences, and some argue it is scientific misconduct. At its extreme, medical ghostwriting involves pharmaceutical companies hiring professional writers to produce papers promoting their products but hiding those contributions and instead naming academic physicians or scientists as the authors. To improve transparency, many editors' associations and journals allow professional medical writers to contribute to the writing of papers without being listed as authors provided their role is acknowledged. This debate examines how best to tackle ghostwriting in the medical literature from the perspectives of a researcher, an editor, and the professional medical writer

Don't be a fool - Don't use fool's gold

No abstract available

Mythbusting medical writing: goodbye, ghosts! Hello, help!

To meet ethical and scientific obligations, authors should submit timely, high-quality manuscripts. Authors, however, can encounter ethical (e.g., authorship designation) and practical (e.g., time and resource limitations) challenges during manuscript preparation. Could professional medical writers—not ghostwriters—help authors address these challenges? This essay summarizes evidence countering three myths that may have hindered authors from considering the use of professional medical writers. Authors with sufficient time, writing expertise, and reporting guideline knowledge may meet their obligations without writing assistance. Unfortunately, not all authors are in this position. Decisions about writing support should be based on evidence, not myths

Time to finger point or fix? An invitation to join ongoing efforts to promote ethical authorship and other good publication practices

In this commentary, we present evidence that unethical authorship (eg, guest and ghost authoring) and other publication practices are not restricted to the pharmaceutical industry; they also occur in academia. Such practices are not an industry problem-they are a research problem. To enhance trust in industry sponsored research, companies have made rapid and far-reaching changes to their publication guidelines, policies, and procedures. Professional medical writers have adopted, and continue to implement, these changes. Although evidence indicates that industry practices are improving, there is certainly more to do, both in industry and academia. We invite readers to join ongoing efforts to promote ethical publication practices

Poor compliance with reporting research results-we know it's a problem..how do we fix it?

No abstract available