Giving up the ghost: exorcising biomedical research articles

Abstract

In 2009, medical editors from around the world gathered at a Peer Review Congress in Vancouver, Canada, to discuss, among other things, “ghost authorship” of medical research articles. Ghost authorship of such articles involves deliberate suppression of the fact that it’s been written by someone other than the named author or authors. In most cases of academic ghost authorship, (not to be confused with ghost authorship of sporting “autobiographies"), an article is written by a professional medical writer who is commissioned or employed by a pharmaceutical company. The name of this ghost author is suppressed and the only names that appear on the article are those of researchers. These “authors” (sometimes referred to as “guest authors”) are often prominent academics who might have been involved in conducting the research, but not in writing the article itself. Evidence presented at the Vancouver conference suggested approximately one in ten research articles submitted to major medical journals has a ghost author.