Ghost authorship

[Guest guest]

Ghost writing is sometimes considered to be a practice in which any of us with money/grants can hire someone with writing skills to write our paper for us and is a practice that is often endorsed by reputed medical journals (as many of us may be good scientists but lousy writers). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_writing

The other form of ghost writing is where pharmaceutical companies pay physicians or scientists to produce papers in medical or scientific journals on the outcomes of new medications. This is off course not likely to be an ethical practice.

Professional medical writers can write papers without being listed as authors of the paper and without being considered unethical ghostwriters, provided their role is acknowledged. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostwriter

rakesh

On 1/2/09, smitaavanti <smitaavanti@...> wrote:

What is Ghost Authorship and Ghostwriting in Publications?

Can anybody elaborate?

Dr. Smita Sontakke

[Guest guest]

Hi,

Rakesh has very explicitly stated the meaning of Ghost –writing.

For naming a person as a ghost writer we need to know what should be the criteria for authorship. There are a number of different criteria that can be used to determine the merit of inclusion as an author. The most frequently cited are the guidelines of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), mentioned in one of my earlier posts. (International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. Uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals: writing and editing for biomedical publication. Available at http://www.icmje.org/ Updated October 2007.)

Some journals use these guidelines expressly, or in modified form, though for many journals the requirements for authorship are unclear, with less than 40% of journals reviewed in one study giving no guidance on authorship at all. The criteria for authorship may also be unclear to researchers. In such situations it may be difficult for the reader to know who really did the work that has been published, and thereby be able to determine whether the paper is credible.

There are three situations that editors come across frequently: "guest" authorship, "ghost" authorship and "gofer" authorship.

Guest authors are those "important" persons who insist that their names appear on the papers of their juniors, even when they have made minimum contribution to the research.

Ghost authors are those who make a significant contribution to the writing of a paper, but their names do not appear as an author on the publication. This is often a situation found in clinical trials sponsored by pharmaceutical companies. These companies may consider that inclusion of their own writer may diminish the credibility of the publication since there is an obvious conflict of interest. Ghost authorship may be very common – one recent study showed evidence of ghost authorship in 75% of 44 industry-initiated clinical trials .

"Gofer" is a name given to someone who is regarded as very junior and so is sent to "go for" something and bring it back to the more important members of a team. In research this often refers to juniors whose task is only to collect specimens or data, but who make no contribution to study design or data analysis or to the final manuscript.

Reference: R. Mason. Guests, ghosts and gofers. J Infect Developing Countries 2008; 2(2):78-80.

Dr. Smita Sontakke