With Marc Hauser as background, Gerald Koocher, in an NPR interview, spells out some categories of research fraud.
… The kinds of things that the federal government focuses on for federally funded research is mostly what’s called F, F and P: fabrication, which is making up data out of whole cloth; falsification, which is modifying your data to fit your needs; or plagiarism, passing off someone else’s work as your own.
But we are also concerned, for example, about questionable authorship practices, where you take credit for something that someone else really did most of the work on or where you list an honorific author in the hopes that their prestige will get you published, or when you are careless, such as sloppy record keeping, or when you intentionally rig your samples so that – or your methods so that you bias the results; when you don’t adequately supervise your research assistant so that some mistakes are made and never detected, and inappropriate data gets incorporated in the analyses…
Here, via a link provided by Mike, a reader, is a scholarly paper with 144 authors. UD‘s used to seeing thirty or forty med school professors listed at the tops of papers, but these are astronomers, and — as Carl Sagan used to say — there are billions and billions of them.
A writer at the Times Higher Education Supplement points out that there are 36.3 words per author in this piece, so assuming authorship is truly shared among the 144, each one wrote about two sentences.
Financial Times:
A long-delayed academic paper analysing use of multiple sclerosis drugs failed to disclose all of the authors who worked on it, sparking fresh concerns over the practice of “ghost writing” in medical journals.
Karen Facey, a researcher, was commissioned in September 2007 to prepare a paper for the British Medical Journal on the government-backed “risk sharing scheme” for MS treatment and commented on subsequent drafts, but was not cited either as an author or a contributor in the final version published last December.
The issue has come to light at a time of growing efforts by medical journals to clamp down on “ghost writing”, the process by which medical writers prepare draft papers often on behalf of pharmaceutical companies, and then find academics willing to lend credibility by adding their names to the work…
Yes, well, word is getting around about semi-literate medical school professors credited with having published 2,785 scholarly articles. It just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
Scientific American describes the phenomenon and summarizes a recent study of the subject:
Scientists credited for research articles that were secretly penned by ghostwriters from pharmaceutical companies often are not reprimanded for their misrepresentations; rather, their ranks and career trajectories often improve.
Although this practice of undisclosed authors (with undisclosed commercial interests) writing articles under the pretense of unbiased scientific inquiry raises serious concerns about academic integrity, few institutions have policies to discourage it.
… Once medical publishing’s “dirty little secret,” ghostwriting is no longer under wraps, thanks in part to a 2009 federal court decision to release 1,500 documents describing the strategic placement of marketing messages into peer-reviewed medical literature. In their article [the authors] say these cleverly crafted advertisements from pharmaceutical companies shape the literature in subtle but important ways, and can even affect how clinicians perceive and prescribe treatments.
“Your typical family practice physician is bombarded with glossy reprints,” [one author] explains. “The more prestigious the university and the researcher’s name on it, the more weight that’s going to carry with the doctor.”
Ah yes. If Cardinal Newman were writing The Idea of a University today, he’d write The idea of a university is to gain enough prestige to make its medical faculty worth ghosting.
Coming down hard on university students who plagiarize, but letting plagiarizing professors get away with it is a well-established national scandal… International, really, as in the recent case of New Zealand novelist and professor Witi Ihimaera.
When I say well-established, I mean not only multiple individual cases at our best schools, like Harvard Law; I mean the department-wide, accepted practice of plagiarism throughout many American medical schools, where a combination of courtesy authorship and ghostwriting thoroughly undermines research integrity.
By December 8, a group of our best med schools must answer a questionnaire sent to them by Senator Charles Grassley, who wants to know why some of their faculty publish
medical journal articles in which an outside writer — sometimes paid by a drug or medical devices company whose product is being studied — has done extensive work on the article without being named on the publication. Instead, one or more academic researchers may receive author credit.
Mr. Grassley said ghostwriting had hurt patients and raised costs for taxpayers because it used prestigious academic names to promote medical products and treatments that might be expensive or less effective than viable alternatives.
It’s just like the prestigious names at law schools, except that there the articles and books are written not by drug companies and their agents at ghostwriting firms, but by teams of students who essentially write the book for the professor, who then puts his or her name on it. This practice has its own name — it’s not called ghostwriting or courtesy authorship, but rather the atelier method.
Mr. Grassley asked the universities to describe their policies on both ghostwriting and plagiarism and to enumerate complaints and describe investigations into both practices since 2004.
… Mr. Grassley’s letter highlighted the disparate treatment of students and professors who claimed authorship of a paper that was not their own.
“Students are disciplined for not acknowledging that a paper they turned in was written by somebody else,” Mr. Grassley wrote. “But what happens when researchers at the same university publish medical studies without acknowledging that they were written by somebody else?”
1.) THE MEDICAL ACADEMIC COMMUNITY: WHERE TRUTH IS AN OPTIONAL EXTRA.
How did we get to the point that falsifying the medical literature is acceptable? How did an industry whose products have contributed to astounding advances in global health over the past several decades come to accept such practices as the norm? Whatever the reasons, as the pipeline for new drugs dries up and companies increasingly scramble for an ever-diminishing proportion of the market in “me-too” drugs, the medical publishing and pharmaceutical industries and the medical academic community have become locked into a cycle of mutual dependency, in which truth and a lack of bias have come to be seen as optional extras.
2.) A LOSS OF THAT CERTAIN QUALITY.
Professor Larry Van Sickle, who teaches sociology [at Rollins College] … has no specific rules except that the computer just be used for note taking, but also says, “There is something to be said for person-to-person communication. The way I run my classes, discussion is important, and when a student is hiding behind a laptop, there is a loss of that certain quality of human conversation.”
… One of [the people named as an author of a published paper on a new heart device] is a true ghost author. Anthony Rickards, a cardiologist, … died before the research was conducted….
Even if you die before the research is conducted, you can ghostwrite the results!
I guess Rickards’ estate got his ghost fee.
I’m getting this from The Guardian; England too is beginning to reckon up its ghosts.
One of them – this one’s still alive – is in a spot of trouble.
One of Britain’s leading bone specialists is facing disciplinary action over accusations that he was involved in “ghost writing”.
The wider phenomenon has come to light through documents disclosed in the US courts which have revealed a culture in which doctors agree to “author” studies written by employees of drug firms. The doctors may have some input but do not have access to all the evidence from the drug trial on which the paper’s conclusions are based, the documents showed.
The General Medical Council will call Professor Richard Eastell in front of a fitness to practice committee. Eastell, a bone expert at Sheffield University, has admitted he allowed his name to go forward as first author of a study on an osteoporosis drug even though he did not have access to all the data on which the study’s conclusions were based. An employee of Proctor and Gamble, the US company making Actonel, was the only author who had all the figures…
Background on Eastell, and on Sheffield’s shameful attempt to shut up one of Eastell’s colleagues, a man with a conscience who condemned the scandal, is here.
.. there’s some asshole of an editor who’s probably getting a cut.
None of the [scientific journal] editors reported taking action against an author for ghostwriting. Their replies to [Senator Grassley’s letter to them about it], obtained by The New York Times, varied from assurances of editorial diligence to the equivalent of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” One editor in chief, for example, wrote that because his journal prohibited ghostwriting, the publication did not have a specific policy on the practice.
You see how it works. It’s like — America prohibits murder, so we don’t have a specific policy on the practice. The prohibition does the trick.
“Requiring someone to write a retraction or barring them from publishing in academic journals for some period of time — that would be an effective deterrent,” said George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh who has conducted research on the effect of conflict-of-interest disclosures in medicine. … Dr. Cynthia E. Dunbar, the editor in chief of Blood, said that, in the future, the journal would consider a ban of several years for authors caught lying about ghostwriting, in addition to retracting their ghosted articles.
Oh, now we’re getting harsh. Do we really have to go there? Look how effective university conflict of interest prohibitions are! They’ve got that COI language right there in the annual report of each professor, and does it ever do the trick.
They’re just beginning to haunt Australia.
At least one article submitted to Australia’s leading medical journal in recent years was ”ghost written” by a writer employed by a drug or medical device company, its editor says.
Martin van der Weyden, editor of the Medical Journal of Australia, has called for a government-funded investigation into the influence that industry has on research papers.
However, he believes the problem in Australia is not nearly as bad as in North America, where there is a scandal over the extent of ghost writing in leading medical journals.
… Mr van der Weyden said pharmaceutical companies had a far smaller influence on research in Australia, but he had to stay on alert for telltale signs of their influence on submitted articles…
… where the curiouser and curiouser medical journal industry is meeting to talk about itself.
… [S]ome conference participants [questioned] the journals’ financial models: They rely on unpaid volunteers to review article submissions and on revenue from companies that buy reprints of articles that depict their products favorably.
Your subscribers are mainly American doctors — among the most highly paid people on earth. What do you charge them? Doesn’t say in this Chronicle of Higher Ed article, and UD‘s too grossed out by the subject to check at the moment … But… unpaid volunteers as reviewers? Can’t do any better than that? Even UD, a lowly humanist, gets money or books or some sort of compensation to review manuscripts.
[Update, correction: UD had in mind book manuscripts as something for which people like her do get various forms of compensation (rarely money — usually free books). As the comment thread of this post makes clear, she should have disentangled book from article manuscript. Indeed the reading of articles is, in her field as well, uncompensated (at least it is for her and the people she knows).
I don’t know whether the Vancouver participants who suggest paid reviewers are correct that this will help things.]
Conference topics included the failure of journals and their authors to disclose corporate connections, the reluctance of researchers to share their data, the use of misleading rhetoric in journal articles, and the almost uniform ability of authors rejected by one journal to get published in another.
If at first you don’t succeed, lie, lie again.
… The conference participants included representatives of several of the drug companies, who largely sat silently through the repeated depiction of their industry as an obstacle to the unbiased pursuit of medical research.
Zzzzzzz……
“Plus,” said UD to Mr UD at lunch just now (they had leftover Chinese food plus an egg and cheese omelet), “there are ghost letters.”
“Ghosted scientific articles, and ghosted letters?”
“Listen to this:
[Jenny] White and colleague Lisa Bero, PhD, [both] of the University of California San Francisco, found 24 articles that were produced as a result of grants that Parke-Davis gave to [ghostwriting firm] Medical Education Systems in 1996 and 1997 to draft articles and letters to the editor regarding gabapentin [Neurontin] for publication in peer reviewed journals.
So they ghostwrite articles, and they ghostwrite letters in response to the articles they themselves have ghostwritten.”
“So… say a letter to the editor criticizing a ghostwritten article that the corporate ghost who’s written the original article then ghosts a response to is itself ghostwritten,” mused Mr UD. “If you catch my drift. Then you have significant research debate in high-level journals carried on exclusively by ghosts.”
“Ghost vs. Ghost, as Mad Magazine would say… But wait. Say the entire debate is carried on by the same ghost, in order to make the thing look more legit. Like, you know how corporate-generated, pretend-grassroots campaigns feature letters with on-purpose writing mistakes to make them look real? So maybe here you’re getting a vast fake controversy about the Neurontin results — all of it generated by one ghost, back and forth, back and forth with himself — here indignant, there defensive, here threatening to sue, there threatening to cancel his subscription… ”
“Fun!”
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(UD thanks Pharma Marketing Blog
for the image.)
Forest Labs budgeted $100,000 for ghostwriting articles about its antidepressant Lexapro. The news came in a copy of Forest’s 2004 Lexapro marketing plan, unveiled by the Senate’s Special Committee on Aging. [Forest] budgeted $100,000, including “honoraria” for authors, for articles that would appear in medical journals, consumer publications, and on the internet.
… The document will doubtless be of interest to federal prosecutors, who in February sued Forest for allegedly promoting its anti-depressants for pediatric use without FDA approval, and paying kickbacks to doctors to encourage prescriptions. The complaint also alleges that the company hid a negative study that later was used by the FDA in a decision to give both drugs black box warnings.
The document also indicates that Forest expected to put Emory University on its payroll.
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Our anti-depressants are rife.
We give them to you and your wife.
With no ifs or maybes
We give them to babies
And make them pill-poppers for life.
Je suis sick of people, like this person, this Canadian person, defending university professors who use ghostwriters.
Let me take up each of this person’s points.
POINT ONE: Professors are too busy to write their own papers.
RESPONSE TO POINT ONE : If you are a professor too busy to write papers, get another job. Professors are two things – teachers and researchers. If you want primarily to teach and not be under pressure to produce research, teach in a high school, or in a teaching college.
POINT TWO: Medical school professors are terrible writers.
RESPONSE TO POINT TWO: English professors are terrible writers. Most of them. Not only do they do their own writing despite this, they get their writing published. You must write your own papers even if you are a terrible writer.
ADDENDUM TO POINT TWO: If medical school professors are total illiterates — a claim that is also sometimes made — they should not be professors in universities. Professors may certainly be bad writers, but they must not be so non-functional that they, say, cannot read a ballot in order to register their vote in an election. Such people must not be propped up with ghostwriters. They must be removed from the premises.
POINT THREE: Medical school professors are retarded. They are slow. Ghostwriters get crucial research results out fast.
RESPONSE TO POINT THREE: If medical school professors are so dull-witted that they cannot release a research results paper before the chemical composition of human beings has shifted, they must be removed from the premises.
POINT FOUR: The editorial staffs of research publications are so busy that they need ghostwriters to clean up the submissions they receive.
RESPONSE TO POINT FOUR: The editorial staffs of research publications are editorial staffs. It is their job to respond editorially to submissions they receive. If editorial staffs of research publications are not editorial staffs, they must be removed from the premises.
SUMMARY AND RECOMMENDATIONS:
This writer paints a tragic portrait of UD‘s fellow professors. Alone, all alone, they toil night and day in their labs, doing the best they can given their inability to read and write English. There’s no one on campus to help them write; there’s no one to help them write on the editorial staff of the journals to which they send their work. Their only hope of publication and advancement — and our only hope, as people whose very lives depend on the publication of their research results — lies with the ghostwriters.
But wait. There is someone on campus to help them write! I mean, first of all, most articles of this sort have twenty or so authors. I’ll bet among all those people you might find one, even at a med school, who knows how to write a sentence. And not only that, but all universities have writing centers, where people help students and professors understand why plagiarism, ghostwriting, buying papers online, and related activities of the busy illiterate, are wrong.
These same people at the writing center can help you write your paper! You just head over there from the lab with your scribbled notes… Or if you can’t even manage scribbled notes, just talk to the person at the writing center and she can help you organize your thoughts and start learning how to write them down.
I know. You’re scared. You’ve never written anything on your own before. Just go. Just give it a try.
From an editorial in The Hindu:
It is scandalous that ghostwritten papers that mimic well-researched science manage to get published in reputed medical journals. The effect is to mislead doctors by playing down the harmful effects of the drug and encouraging them to prescribe it to more patients. What is shocking is the willingness of researchers of repute to lend their names to the ghostwritten papers.
A commenter on the editorial writes:
The consequences of such misleading literature are particularly disastrous in third world countries like India where most practicing physicians & surgeons base their knowledge on medical journals and technique reports rather than on expensive hands-on workshops and courses.