As health care groups join Occupy Wall Street, a UD update on the practice of corporate ghostwriting among medical school professors.
Ghost authorship … involves deliberate suppression of the fact that [a scientific research article has] been written by someone other than the named author or authors.
In most cases of academic ghost authorship … an article is written by a professional medical writer who is commissioned or employed by a pharmaceutical company.
The name of this ghost author is suppressed and the only names that appear on the article are those of researchers.
These “authors” (sometimes referred to as “guest authors”) are often prominent academics who might have been involved in conducting the research, but not in writing the article itself.
Evidence [suggests that] approximately one in ten research articles submitted to major medical journals has a ghost author.
October 23rd, 2011 at 5:59PM
I guess it’s a cost-saving measure to keep health care costs low. Doctors no longer have to use their valuable time to write the articles. lol