Lies, Damn Lies, and Ghostwritten Medical Articles

No one knows how long pharmaceutical companies will get away with this increasingly common practice of researching and writing articles that they want published, then finding some hapless, desperate young professor willing to trade his or her name recognition for a "free" publication. But who is doing the writing? There has been almost no discussion of the collusion and planning that goes in to the new tide of ghostwritten medical journal articles handed out to academic physicians in return for the objectivity that a seemingly unbiased author provides.

The exposure of those who run these "paper mills" will happen eventually, and it will make for terrifying reading. Editors and consumer safety advocates will team up to figure out a way to go back and investigate any author's claim to have done research in any particular paper, or even to identify patterns among papers that have been ghostwritten - heuristics for a "fraud finder." But the danger of the growth of this practice in the long run is that authorship can eventually become a kind of consulting practice for smart, expert docs who need to corner the knowledge market in their specialty, and at the same time the publication of highly positive data under the authorship of Dr. Knowsalot will sell drugs for The Big Company. Obviously no one really knows just how many pieces a year are submitted to journals with fraudulent authorship, but editors are beginning to pioneer ways of identifying it. As the awareness of this practice increases, it will become more and more obvious that it is not rogue activity by people in isolated divisions of companies, but in fact a concerted push to change the way in which information is disseminated in health science, and in a way that benefits only the companies doing the changing.