Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times
George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil
It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo
There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub
You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann
Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog
University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog
[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal
Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education
[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University
Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University
The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog
Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages
Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway
From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law
University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it.
Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association
The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog
I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes
As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
The Bitch Girls
Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical
University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life
[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada
If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte
June 12th, 2011 at 4:10AM
I thought it was just sarcasm when I read this:
“most scientific papers have like five to twenty authors, with only the first author… actually having any involvement in experimenting and writing”
but no longer certain of that by the time I got to this:
“Some of those not-first writers, let’s speculate, had little to do with the article…”
It doesn’t seem appropriate to conflate all scientific publications with the subset of papers which appear in medical journals. This piling on of authors unconnected to the work would cause immediate and serious strife in, for example, a chemistry lab in an academic setting in the US.
Re Ghostwriting: I was under the impression that this pervades the secondary literature (ie bogus review articles), but that the primary literature was still written by the parties who carried out the studies. Whether a study was appropriately designed, whether the results were honestly presented, whether there was disclosure of funding and COI are matters different from whether a study was ghostwritten.
June 12th, 2011 at 5:20AM
Mike: On your first point – This blog has over many years focused on the medical journals and their pharma- and device-related papers. This of course makes up an enormous scientific literature with far-reaching implications for millions of peoples’ lives. I’ve pointed out in other posts that there are certainly exceptions in academic science to the structural corruption of these areas – I should have pointed it out somewhere in this post as well. (I’ve now changed the post to make this clear.) Even in the more abstract areas of science, though, I wouldn’t be surprised to see guest authorship — especially outside the United States.
Your second point is similar to your first – That only a certain segment of the scientific literature is vulnerable to having been ghostwritten for corporations who are essentially advertising a drug or a device through a journal, and an author, on whose seeming intellectual legitimacy they are relying. Yes, and I’m only focusing on that (rich, vast, powerful) segment.
Ghostwriting is indeed intimately connected to things like COI, funding disclosure, and experimental design, being a key part of a nexus of dishonest activities systematically undermining our – and our doctors’ – ability to choose proper medication.
June 12th, 2011 at 7:41AM
Mike: it isn’t just the secondary medical literature that is ghostwritten – bogus review articles, as you put it. In the primary reporting of Pharma-sponsored clinical trials, I would say ghostwriting is the rule. It is routinely done to maximize spin and market impact – talking up the positives, glossing over the negatives, switching endpoints, and all the other deceits of the trade. There are famous examples out there – Paxil study 329 is one.