Some of your med school colleagues routinely list three, four, five hundred publications on their cvs. And all you can do is gaze in wonderment at these superior creatures.
You owe it to yourself to learn about the massive ghost and guest (also known as honorary) writing industry in this country. Drudges – drawn from pharma-controlled ghostwriting companies or from underlings in the lab – do most or all of the writing for these creatures.
It’s quite the scam. And it ain’t going anywhere.
More than 600 biomedical journals have adopted guidelines for responsible and accountable authorship established by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, but previous research has found that the prevalence of honorary authors in articles is as high as 39 percent and the use of ghost authors as high as 11 percent.