Senator Chuck Grassley has asked eight leading medical journals to describe their policies and practices regarding ghostwriting.
Grassley said his inquiry is part of his broader effort to establish transparency with regard to financial relationships between the pharmaceutical industry and medical professionals.
“Public dollars and the public trust are at stake in the practice of medicine, and the information that is shared in these journals can influence decisions made by doctors and their patients,” Grassley said. “Transparency can do a lot of good in building confidence that there’s nothing to hide, and that applies to how expert opinion is presented in public forums like these journals provide.”
What the Senator’s staff (who ghost wrote the letter) failed to understand is that almost all journals have adopted strict policies on ghost writing and transparency and all of them are easily found on their internet sites (see links)( it took me all of ten minutes to find them, but who’s counting):
· American Journal of Medicine,
· The Annals of Internal Medicine,
· The Annual Review of Medicine,
· The Archives of Internal Medicine,
· The Journal of the American Medical Association, and
· The New England Journal of Medicine.
In December, Grassley wrote to Wyeth and DesignWrite, a medical education and communications company, regarding allegations that Wyeth hired DesignWrite to draft articles promoting the company’s hormone therapy products and seek academic investigators to sign on as the primary authors.
The Senator is asking each journal for the following information:
- What is the journal’s position regarding the practice of ghostwriting?
- Does the journal have any written policies regarding ghostwritten articles? If so, please provide a copy of those policies.
- Is an author who submits an article for publication required to disclose to the journal the direct or indirect involvement of any drug or device company or other third party in the development and/or writing of the article?
- What are the journal’s policies or practices regarding public disclosure of the involvement of any drug or device company or other third party in the development and/or writing of a journal article, in particular when the listed authors are not affiliated with the company or third party?
5. Since 2004, has the journal taken action against any author for failing to disclose the involvement of a third party in the development and/or drafting of a manuscript? If so, please provide details.
And of course they have until July 22nd just three weeks to respond.
Every journal of any repute stands against ghostwriting and guest authoring. Over the last 8 years or so, editors and journals have adopted increasingly strict policies to determine valid authorship, including asking manuscript authors to fill out increasingly-detailed forms about their role on a paper.
Many check boxes now get done; attestations made, and so on. Organizations of journal editors and publishers ICMJE and ISMPP have published guidelines clearly calling for recognition of contributions to medical papers, ranging from full authors to those whose efforts are a bit less and don't meet full authorship criteria – e.g. they receive acknowledgment.
Organizations of medical writers – U.S. (AMWA), European (EMWA) also support full disclosure of writers' efforts, source of funding, etc..
Editors basically take what they are told – they don't have investigative resources (or authority), and unless a third party comes forth with information, an editor has no way to know whether or not a named author really "did' what they say they did, or if some hired writer wrote most of the paper. (And let's not overlook the common practice in academia of putting colleagues on papers as authors based on a short conversation in the hall, or supplying a reagent for a lab test, etc. or the practice of getting your assistants to write your papers without naming them. These are viewed as 'acceptable' because the guest authoring is not occurring due to payments by a pharmaceutical company… Do you think this is “ghost writing,” it is still dishonest and every bit as wrong).
Some companies did some of the sort of ghostwriting that Grassley is asking about previously; our understanding is that all have moved a long way from it by now.
In his letter the Senator stated that previously, Grassley had written to Merck and Scientific Therapeutics Information, a medical publishing company, regarding similar allegations reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association related to articles on Merck’s VIOXX studies.
What the Senator failed to take into account is that most of the articles quoted in the JAMA paper were from the mid-to- late 90s; and things changed enormously in the 2001-2003 timeframe. Two of the authors were paid > $300,000 and (over the course of 15-20 years), more than $20 MILLION by plaintiffs attorneys including Mark Lanier – but the editors at JAMA did not seem to feel that any of that needed to be disclosed to readers of JAMA, and so it goes.
In some respect this is embarrassing for the senator to send out such letters and a press release with no thought that this information is so readily available on the web. In the future a simple web search or phone call could have answered his questions without casting negative dispersions on the journals reputations.
I realize the senators staff would like to gain understanding of what is happening, but sending out press releases that you are “Investigating a journal, doctor or medical school” based on no evidence, just so you can get a couple of lines in the Sunday NY Times, is shameful.