EconTech

As I have noted, I have serious concerns about how medical research is conducted. Now, there is evidence that we should be worrying about the authorship of the articles.

JAMA article on ghostwriting medical studies

The Journal of the American Medical Association published a piece today on ghostwriting of medical research. Thanks to the Vioxx lawsuits, the authors say that they found documents “describing Merck employees working either independently or in collaboration with medical publishing companies to prepare manuscripts and subsequently recruiting external, academically affiliated investigators to be authors. Recruited authors were frequently placed in the first and second positions of the authorship list.’’ One of the exhibits uses a placeholder “External author?’’ for the expert to be named. Obviously the idea that a pharmaceutical company is pre-writing clinical studies is as controversial as doctors possibly signing off on them without really being involved. A NYT article has some comments, and Merck has released a press statement.

Ross, J et al (2008) “Guest Authorship and Ghostwriting in Publications Related to Rofecoxib. A Case Study of Industry Documents From Rofecoxib Litigation” JAMA 299(15):1800-1812.

In my mind, not only does this present a worrying picture of how the research may be conducted, but such behavior gets into the complicated area of plagiarism. Would agreeing to put yourself as the lead author of a study you had little to no participation in qualify as plagiarism when the authors of said study agree to put your name on it? How different is that from coming up with a research program and having a team of graduate students and post-docs conduct and write-up the research results? It is not so much an issue of copyright infringement, but of academic honesty. Could allowing your name to be used in such a way land you in front of an academic review panel?

I’ve mentioned before that Randy Picker has written about the shady lines between plagiarism and copyright violation.

Note: These are questions. I honestly do not know.