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.
September 3rd, 2009 at 8:10AM
Although UD has squashed this gnat with a sledgehammer…
Most of the so-called senior authors know how to write or at least get papers published. Most of them are chosen by the ghosts because they have a reputation and a lot of papers already published.
In the sciences it is not uncommon for a new investigator whose native language is not English to have difficulties. Then UD’s advice toward the end is good. Most of the time they can find some senior colleague in their field to look at papers and grants before submission. Good supportive places sometimes even have a formal mechanism for this.
I see very little evidence that serious editorial work is done at scientific journals. Unfortunately this task often falls on the shoulders of sympathetic referees.
September 3rd, 2009 at 12:01PM
Bill Gleason said "I see very little evidence that serious editorial work is done at scientific journals. Unfortunately this task often falls on the shoulders of sympathetic referees."
All true. The journal Nature ran a funny commentary a while back decrying the editor as postman syndrome. Since the arrival of Manuscript Central, that has only gotten worse. Now they are electronic postmen. Perversely, the electronic systems have intensified pressure on reviewers to hurry up. The result is more perfunctory reviews and even less help to struggling authors.
Another pathology is the editor as impresario syndrome. They are so busy organizing Position Statements and Consensus Conferences, and looking out for their Impact Factors, that they have little time for boring tradecraft.
September 3rd, 2009 at 2:15PM
UD: this ("If you can’t teach and write a paper at the same time, teach in a high school") is not fair. There are, despite what people think, teachers and researchers working in high schools. That kind of elitism is what gives professors bad names.
September 3rd, 2009 at 2:40PM
While not excusing ghostwriting at all, it is true that academic medical centers have one pressure that UD does not mention. Don’t forget that these faculty, in addition to teaching and research, are also expected to provide patient care as part of their assignment. And that competition for the health care dollar is intense. Now, plenty of people figure out how to do that honorably, but it’s not true that teaching and research (oh, yeah, and service) are their only responsibilities.
September 3rd, 2009 at 4:23PM
jeff: Point taken, and I looked long and hard at that sentence before I went with it. The tone was snarky, for which I apologize, but the content I think holds — All I meant to say was that high school teachers and professors at teaching colleges don’t have publication pressures — they may, as you say, choose to do research, but they’re not under the same sort of obligation university professors are to do research. What I should have added, I suppose, is that I’m very ambivalent — as are people like Mark Bauerlein — about the publish or perish for everyone bit. Not only does it produce outrages like ghosted articles; it also produces a whole lot of worthless research.
I’ve rewritten the sentence in an attempt to de-snark it.
September 3rd, 2009 at 4:32PM
That’s an important point, Dennis, but it brings up a whole other problem with medical faculties. They are simply asked to do — and to be — too much, as your comment suggests.
Are they really professors, with the same ethos and institutional expectations that, say, law professors at their school have? Why are we really surprised when quite a number of them — high-level figures at places like Harvard and Emory — turn out not to be professors so much as salesmen and saleswomen? Of course there aren’t enough hours in the day for these people to be real writers of articles and real classroom instructors. Instead they are a sort of pseud — a person who does a little of this and a little of that but who is essentially a practicing physician with corporate ties to pharma or medical device businesses, etc. Perhaps, like Schatzberg at Stanford, they are primarily entrepreneurs, busy stockholders in start-up companies related to their research, etc.
The farcical history of conflict of interest policies at universities has to do with the absurd conceit that people like Schatzberg and Nemeroff and Polly are professors. Call them clinical professors; call them anything you want. They represent a humongous problem for American universities because they are not professors.
September 3rd, 2009 at 4:51PM
Much of the discussion of ghostwriting misses the point. The point is not whether clinical investigators can write or whether they need help or whether they have the time to research the literature for a passable review article. The point is that the published articles under fire were bloody well COMMISSIONED!
They were not generated by the spontaneous intellectual activity and curiosity of the nominal authors. They were commissioned by corporate marketing departments, outsourced to medical writing and communication companies, and strategically crafted for maximum impact in carefully chosen journals. Once the corporation is satisfied that the product is “on message,” complaisant academics are approached. These individuals are PAID to look at the text, maybe suggest a few edits, and to lend their names to the authorship line. They understand that their job is to leave the spin in place, even at the cost of obfuscation. Often, they have had no role in obtaining the primary research data. A good example of this pattern is the role of Martin Keller from Brown University in the infamous Glaxo Study 329 of Paxil in children. He has lots of company.
Often, these same academics try to have it both ways by publishing independent review articles without being forthright about their “consulting” role in promoting corporate publishing agendas. The way they write their reviews tells a lot about their conflicts – decisions, decisions… what to suppress, what to talk up, how to promote the corporate client while appearing independent?
Margaret is right. These ghostwritten “publications” are not professorial work, they are works for hire, tarted up to seem like the real thing. They corrupt the medical literature.
September 3rd, 2009 at 5:35PM
Yes, I think that’s exactly right, Margaret. They are asked to wear to many hats, and it’s close to impossible to do them all well.
Unfortunately, that pressure seems to be more and more common. Tenure in many fields now seems to include not just publishing, but buying out a certain percentage of your salary on a consistent basis. And, when NIH funding is essentially flat (actually a 13% drop once you factor in inflation), faculty are going to be pressured to get that funding elsewhere. And when even NIH is telling researchers that their research must be "translational", that is have significant linkages to the real world of health care, the pressure to collaborate with private companies is further raised. In fact, without excellent connections with big pharma, big insurance, big health systems, it’s damn difficult to be successful.
So, we’ve (and I do mean we) set up a system in which faculty must pay a portion of their own salary in a funding environment where the scarcity of public dollars almost guarantees private funding and added the constraint that research really needs to be conducted in close collaboration with private companies.
And we’re surprised that conflicts of interest are rising? Yes, many good people resist the temptation, but let’s be realistic about the type of incentives we’ve created.
September 4th, 2009 at 9:19AM
All well and good, but why did we poor Canadians take such a shot?
September 4th, 2009 at 9:37AM
Was kind of below the belt, Colin. Just trying to be funny…
September 4th, 2009 at 10:36AM
It’s health reform season, Colin. If we didn’t have Canada to kick around, we’d have to pay attention to our own faults.
September 4th, 2009 at 10:50AM
Well, others are kicking Canada around, GTWMA. Despite my nasty comment, I’m a major lover of Canada, and I think they have a better health system than we do.
If anyone out there would like me and Mr UD to teach for a semester in Montreal, please let us know. This is a constant fantasy of ours.