Ghostwriting in medical journals is equivalent to fraud, argue lawyers who are calling for tougher sanctions for academics who get caught with their name on article they haven’t authored.
Writing in PLoS medicine, the Canadian experts said ghost-writing was a “disturbing violation of academic integrity standards”, but that medical journals had not embraced recommendations to police article submissions more aggressively.
Furthermore, medical boards and academic institutions had so far failed to issue serious sanctions in the rare cases when an organisation looked into allegations, they said.
In light of this they called for a “firm legal response”. The practice of getting academics to add their names to papers written by medical writers could be deterred by imposing a legal liability of the ‘guest authors’, they suggested.
Any false affirmations by an author could then be classified as fraud, giving rise to class actions by readers claiming damages for subscriptions to a journal that had lost integrity.
The same principles could support claims of “fraud on the court” against pharmaceutical companies, they argued, writing:
“When a pharmaceutical company helps to produce ghost-written articles and its lawyers cite them in court, the lawyers are, at the very least, reckless about the falsehood and they have a duty to disclose the truth.”
In Australia ghostwriting is thought to be not as prevalent as the US but nevertheless it is still an issue. And according to the MJA, more can be done to address it.
“It's worse for journals that publish a lot of drug studies but we have had articles submitted to the MJA that we suspect have been ghost written,” deputy editor of Ruth
Armstrong told Rheumatology Update.
Editors try to guard against it by requiring declarations of authorship, conflicts of interest, sponsorship and writing assistance, and, of course, rigorous editorial processes and peer review, she said.
“Signing off on someone else's work is fraud and could cause harm. We would welcome any measures to eradicate this problem,” she added.
PloS Medicine 2011; 8:e1001070.doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001070