Ah, law school. Read all about it.
The Great Law and Med School Publication Pumping Machine is a scandal UD should say more about on this blog. The subject usually comes up in relation either to conflict of interest at med schools, where faculty pharmawhores have their articles ghostwritten by the industry, or to guest authorship, where junior professors add the names of senior professors to their articles even though the senior professors did nothing. (These are two reasons why it’s routine for some med school professors to list 800 publications.)
June 16th, 2012 at 6:31AM
And then, the consummate academic impresarios combine both pathologies – conflict of interest and droit du seigneur. I have just looked over the publications credited to the infamous Emory-GlaxoSmithKline-Mount Sinai School of Medicine-NIMH Collaborative Mood Disorders Initiative (5U19MH069056, Principal Investigator Charles Nemeroff). That was a work of hubris like no other. The project soaked up $5.3 million of taxpayer money in 5 years from 2003 to 2008. The productivity was pitiful. Only 7 publications comprise the genuine output of this funding period. Excluding a single productive laboratory, only 2 publications can be identified. If you check on PubMed, however, you will find 32 publications acknowledge funding from this NIMH project. Of these, 23 or 72% are review articles that contain no original data. Most of those are seldom cited, forgettable yawners that serve mainly to pad Nemeroff’s CV.
Senator Grassley is right to ask why NIMH under Nemeroff’s pal Thomas Insel just gave Nemeroff a new research grant. See http://www.margaretsoltan.com/?p=35980
June 17th, 2012 at 5:31AM
Yo, Bernard,
You know Grassley is nothing more than a political opportunist, right?
While he might very well be correct on the matter upon which you have remarked, he was also a high profile proponent of the ‘death panels’ meme.
June 17th, 2012 at 12:47PM
So who’s perfect, Mike? LOL.