Tag: Ghostwriting

What should be done to tackle ghostwriting in the medical literature?

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Author: Gotzsche, PC; Kassirer, JP; Woolley, KL; Wager, E; Jacobs, A; Gertel, A; Hamilton, C Description: 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…

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Cleaning the scientific house: Rebuilding trust in science requires confronting the harms of ghostwriting

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Author: Oreskes, N Description: “Consider the problem of ghostwriting in science. Recently, a colleague and I published a paper analyzing the impacts of a peer-reviewed paper, published in 2000, that purported to be an independent, objective, and comprehensive review of the safety of the pesticide, glyphosate. The paper found no convincing evidence for toxicity, genotoxicity, carcinogenicity, or endocrine disruption. However, documents made public through legal proceedings in 2017 showed that the paper was not, in fact, independent, but had been conceptualized and largely written by Monsanto employees. We wanted to…

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