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Courtesy Authorship, Retraction, Courtesy Kiss-Off…

… is the familiar three-step featured at American medical schools like Emory University.

Emory University has mainly been known as the forcing ground of conflict of interest giants like Charles Nemeroff. Yet while plenty of other American med schools feature COI gone wild, Emory couples COI with high-profile, frequent retraction of fraudulent articles.

How high-profile? Chair of the department of medicine.

How does he manage to have produced (so far) six retracted papers?

Well, as lab honcho, he puts his name on stuff that goes out whether he’s had anything much to do with what’s been written.

This is known as guest writing or courtesy authorship (discussion of the practice here) and it accounts for the fact that when you look at any random med school jerk’s cv it’s going to say he’s published eight hundred articles. Everybody’s sticking their name on everybody else’s paper. It takes a village.

So step one is courtesy authorship. Step two, because you’re too important to notice conniving actual-author underlings, is retraction.

Step three is your amazing retirement party, where without irony people say things like “What is important is not just the quantity of Dr. [Wayne] Alexander’s work, but the quality.”

Margaret Soltan, January 2, 2014 9:14AM
Posted in: march of science

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One Response to “Courtesy Authorship, Retraction, Courtesy Kiss-Off…”

  1. charlie Says:

    UD, have you thought of having grad students/post docs telling their horror stories of department chairs and academic advisors abuse of research authorship? Would make some interesting reading….

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