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.
February 5th, 2010 at 2:23PM
Newman (in 1857, in Dublin) on the purpose of publishing in scholarly journals: “Professors will write: 1. To puff themselves to the world; and 2. to be doing something lest their Professorships should be taken away.” Quite.
February 5th, 2010 at 2:33PM
Wonderful, Colin. Thanks for that.