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 →

Here’s one possible solution to the fraudulent practice of medical ghostwriting that seems so easy, I’m wondering why all medical journal editors are not already doing it, given the current bad press garnered by the Wyeth Pharmaceuticals medical ghostwriting scandal, among many others. Editor-in-chief of the Journal of Managed Care Pharmacy Dr. Frederic Curtiss has told Reuters Health that data attached to documents created in Microsoft Word have allowed him to discover which articles submitted to his journal may have been written by ghostwriters hired by drug companies. 

When documents are saved in Word, the software attaches additional information, called metadata, which identifies who created the document. Subsequent edits or changes made by anybody else (like the medical school academics and researchers who fraudulently claim that they are the real authors) can also be identified. Curtiss estimates that every third manuscript he receives has metadata that does not match the article’s listed authors.  Continue reading →