Ghostwriting
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Abstract
Many medical journal articles are ghostwritten and have honorary authors. This entry briefly describes the phenomenon and the pharmaceutical industry’s roles in creating these articles. In the interest of marketing, the pharmaceutical industry commissions manuscripts to publish its data, analyses, and viewpoints and then finds authors to submit them to medical journals for publication. Medical journals have responded with definitions of authorship intended to define and discourage ghostwriting and honorary authorship, though these efforts have had limited success. A number of bioethicists and philosophers have looked at the phenomenon and have adopted a wide variety of perspectives on it as an issue in bioethics. They range from seeing ghostwriting in terms of plagiarism, breaches of trust, facilitating fraud, serving commercial interests, and violating research ethics. This entry examines and assesses those perspectives and lists some possible ways of addressing the problem.
Keywords
Ghostwriting Medical journal articles Medical science Authorship Pharmaceutical industry Plagiarism Fraud Interests Clinical research ethicsReferences
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