Ghost Marketing: Pharmaceutical Companies and Ghostwritten Journal Articles

Abstract

The use of ghostwriters by industry is subject to increasing public attention and scrutiny. This article addresses the practice and ethics of scientific ghostwriting. We focus on the type of ghostwriting that involves a pharmaceutical company hiring a medical education and communications company to write a paper favorable of their product, who then hires a well-known academic to publish it under his or her name without disclosing the paper's true origins. We argue that this practice is harmful both to the public and to the institutions of science and that it is not justified by an analogy to accepted scientific authorship practices. Finally, we consider ways to discourage the practice.

The Future of Psychopharmacological Enhancements: Expectations and Policies

“…It seems these requirements are not sufficient to avoid the phenomenon of ghostwriting and ghostmanagement: pharmaceutical companies that influence and control the research, analysis, writing and publication of articles [62]. Moffatt and Elliott for example propose a few measures to combat ghostwriting practice, such as the installment of a task force whose task is to track cases of ghostwriting and to sanction authors as well as to inform the public about ghostwritten papers [63]. There are no easy solutions to avoid such phenomena but at the least awareness of all parties involved (investigators, universities, editors etc) of the mechanisms of company influence may help create adequate measures.…”

Legal remedies for medical ghostwriting: Imposing fraud liability on guest authors of ghostwritten articles

“…Commentators have also called for academic sanction [12,29]. But while several established academics have been associated with ghostwritten publications, no public sanctions appear to have been enacted for their behaviour.…”

“…Commentators have condemned the practice as unethical and unacceptable and have discussed the harms resulting from this form of medical ghostwriting, recommending that journal submissions be policed more aggressively and that the ''guest authors'' be suitably sanctioned by journals, academic institutions, and regulatory agencies [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14]. However, these recommendations have not yet been widely embraced by the academic institutions, medical journals, and medical licensing organizations that would seem to have the most at stake in curbing this practice.…”

Who owns this text?: plagiarism, authorship, and disciplinary cultures

“…While two of our subjects spoke of a variety of services for which a technician, statistician, or scientist might get paid rather than receive authorship credit on a project, none of them mentioned the ghost writer, perhaps because the recent growth of this phenomena has been predominantly in the biomedical arena-especially the pharmaceutical-and none of our subjects works in that subfield. In Ghost Marketing, Barton Moffatt and Carl Elliott (2007) examine the practice of pharmaceutical companies hiring communications companies to write favorable reports of their products and then enlisting well-known academics to publish them without disclosure of the research origins (18). This ghostwriting process hides a commercial enterprise in the cloak of academic scientific purity, producing something that appears honest but that violates the public scientific trust.…”