.. 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.
September 18th, 2009 at 7:35PM
It takes no great leap of the imagination to suppose that members of the editorial boards of these journals have ghostwritten articles in their CVs.
The New England Journal of Medicine published an article by Henry Beecher in the early ’60s recounting 21 published instances of questionable ethics in human studies. There was a follow-up article 25 years later by Rothman. While the NEJM did not allow either publication to list the reference, the original article had enough of a description so that each article can be identified. In other words, these were articles that people in the field would have no trouble identifying.
The truly remarkable fact is that the investigator most cited by Beecher was on the editorial board of the New England Journal of Medicine. He stepped down in the ’90s, soon after Curless rejected my letter to the editor pointing out this fact.