Continuing to investigate the practice of ghostwriting, Senator Charles E. Grassley recently sent letters to 10 top medical schools—Harvard, Johns Hopkins, the University of Pennsylvania, Washington University in St. Louis, University of California, San Francisco, Duke, Stanford, the University of Washington, Yale and Columbia.
The purpose of his inquiry was to determine “what the schools are doing about professors who put their names on ghostwritten articles in medical journals — and why that practice was any different from plagiarism by students.” His concern has continued because a New York Times article back in August reported that “many universities have been slow to react to evidence about the extent of” ghostwriting.
According to the New York Times, Mr. Grassley believes that ghostwriting “hurts patients and raises costs for taxpayers because it uses prestigious academic names to promote medical products and treatments that might be expensive or less effective than viable alternatives.”
The Senator specifically wrote that ghostwriting can “manipulate the scientific literature, which can in turn mislead doctors to prescribe treatments that may be ineffective and/or cause harm to their patients, is very troubling.” A recent survey however, showed that ghostwriting is declining.
Part of the problem with addressing the issue is that there are multiple players involved: medical associations, journals, editors’ groups, academic medical centers, individual physicians, researchers and medical companies. While some of these groups have addressed ghostwriting and begun ‘cracking down,’ the New York Times noted that “Merck, Wyeth (now part of Pfizer), GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca are among the companies accused by lawyers and investigators of providing ghostwriters for research papers.”
As a result, Mr. Grassley’s letter “asked the universities to describe their policies on both ghostwriting and plagiarism and to enumerate complaints and describe investigations into both practices since 2004.” He specifically asked:
1) What is the university’s position on medical ghostwriting and/or the use of third party marketing and/or medical education companies in drafting medical review articles and research papers for faculty?
2) Does the university have any written policies regarding ghostwritten articles? If so, please provide a copy of those policies. Also, please identify the type(s) of information faculty members are required to document and/or report to the university regarding their publication activities. In the event that your institution has made changes to its internal policies and procedures since 2004, I would also greatly appreciate understanding those changes.
3) If the university currently does not have written policies on ghostwritten articles, is the university in the process of developing a policy? If not, why not?
4) Since 2004, has the university received and/or investigated any allegations that a faculty member failed to disclose the involvement of a third party that may be paid by a device or drug company in the development and/or drafting of a manuscript? If so, how many allegations did the university receive and what was the outcome of each investigation? Were any actions taken against the faculty member? If so, please provide details.
5) Please explain the university’s position on plagiarism and its policy on students submitting papers purchased from paper mills or plagiarized in other ways.
6) Since 2004, has the university received and/or investigated any allegations that a student failed to disclose the involvement of a third party in the development and/or drafting of a paper? If so, how many allegations did the university receive and what was the outcome of each investigation? Were any actions taken against the student? If so, please provide details.
The medical schools were asked to answer the questions by December 8, 2009. The article acknowledged that a review of most schools Web sites show already existing “policies against ghostwriting or honorary authorship of research papers.”
Senator Grassley was also particularly interested in how some “experts refer to ghostwriting as a form of plagiarism.” He posed the concern that “while students are disciplined for not acknowledging that a paper they turned in was written by somebody else … what happens when researchers at the same university publish medical studies without acknowledging that they were written by somebody else?”
Bringing to light such issues can be important for physicians, patients and the health care system. But it is important not to completely hinder universities from doing their jobs, which include research and education, to stop and devote significant amounts of time to meet short deadline inquiries.
Journals that publish these articles “are widely read by practitioners and are relied upon as being objective and scientific in nature,” as Mr. Grassley wrote, and “the information in these articles can and do have a significant impact on doctors’ prescribing behavior.” This may not be as true as the Senator has come to believe.
What is the Senator actually hoping to get out of this exercise? Ghost writing may not be the best way to present science, but it is neither as wide spread or as dangerous as the media would like you to believe.