Q: What is the difference between a student procuring a ghostwritten paper and a faculty member doing the same?
A: In the first case the student pays, in the second the faculty member may be paid—sometimes a considerable sum.
Although much has been written about students—and professors—plagiarizing, there is an interesting and ongoing variation on plagiarism that is lucrative and in some cases of financial benefit to the plagiarist.
Ghostwriters are uncredited authors and often charge a fee for this service to people like politicians who need to pump out a book before election time to demonstrate their deep minds. The ghostwriter may be acknowledged for help with editorial assistance or not even mentioned.
For some time there has been a continuing scandal over ghostwriting by pharmaceutical companies. In essence a KOL (Key Opinion Leader) is offered the opportunity to put his or her name on a piece of work written by some ghostwriting factory or the drug company itself. Sometimes the supposed author has absolutely no input or the KOL reads it over and makes small revisions.
Why would anyone want to do this? For one thing there is the money paid to the KOL for services rendered. And for another thing the pharmaceutical company benefits from having a piece of work out there in the medical literature that reflects favorably on their product.
Is this ethical? Of course not.
The latest bimbo explosion in this area is the deserved focus on the American Psychiatric Association and ghostwriting. Heavy hitters writing about this matter include: Paul Thacker, Grassley’s former bird dog (meant as a compliment) Gary Schwitzer, Danniel Carlat, Bernard Carroll, Alison Bass, Ed Silverman. A useful starting point for further background is Silverman’s overview: “American Psychiatric Association and Ghostwriting.”
The rub is over a book written by Charles Nemeroff and Alan Schatzberg, who are alleged to have written a textbook on psychiatric disorders. They were beneficiaries of largess from Glaxo-Smith-Kline, Paxil’s daddy, who hired a company to help write the book. The American Psychiatric Association, publishers of the book, denied that any ghostwriting occurred. Subsequently three academics (Carroll, former head of psychiatry at Duke; Robert Rubin, vice-chair of psychiatry at UCLA, and Leemon McHenry, professor of philosophy at Cal State) challenged the disavowal and asked the APA to release relevant materials.
A January 28 letter making this request was ignored for eight weeks and then blown off in a curt email response: “The issue you address … has been covered extensively in January already by the New York Times article, The New York Times’ revisions of the article and in Psychiatric News. Therefore, we will not be printing additional information about it at this time.”
The expected reactions were received: “stonewalling” Bernard Carroll.
Carlat wrote: “I don’t think this issue is going away. It’s time for the APA to prove to the world that they were not complicit with a drug company in publishing a ‘textbook’ that artfully hid Paxil’s side effects.”
Concern about medical ghostwriting has gone global. A conference will be held at the University of Toronto in May on the topic. Participants include: Trudo Lemmons (Toronto) , Gary Schwitzer (Project on Government Oversight), Carl Elliot (Minnesota), Adrian Fugh-Berely (Georgetown), David Healy (Cardiff), and David Korn (Harvard).
Carl Elliot is a faculty member in Bioethics at the University of Minnesota Medical School. He has previously written in The Chronicle about “The Secret Lives of Big Pharma’s ‘Thought Leaders.’”
The full agenda for the meeting can be found at this site.
