Participants at this month’s International Congress on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication in Vancouver heard an interesting medical journal survey report on ghostwriting vs. ‘guest authorship’ that has me scratching my head in confusion. Presented by the Journal of the American Medical Association, the report confirmed that the prevalence of both ‘honorary’ and ‘ghost authors’ in medical journal articles is “still a concern”. 

Here’s a dose of reality for JAMA editors: it’s not just a “concern”.  It’s global fraud being perpetrated upon the innocent patients of the world thanks in part to the lax (some more cynical than I might say ‘non-existent’) controls in place in many medical journal editors’ offices. For example:

• only four of the journals surveyed ask and then publish information on who the actual article authors are (Annals of Internal Medicine, JAMA, Lancet, and PLoS Medicine)
• New England Journal of Medicine claims that the journal “asks about author contributions but doesn’t publish them.” (Earth to NEJM: this is the same as not asking).
• Nature Medicine has “no instructions to authors about disclosing author contributions.”

This sounds like a de facto stamp of approval for the common practice of ghostwriting and ‘guest writing’. But by now, you may be asking the question: “Carolyn, what is the difference between ‘guest writing’ and ‘ghostwriting’ in research published in medical journals”?  The answer, my fellow Nags, is:  not much.  But here’s JAMA’s official definition:  Continue reading →