Faculty on the lookout for ghostwriting
The practice occurs when companies write articles attributed to scholars.
Published Dec. 8, 2009
As students get ready to turn in final projects for many classes, teachers are on the lookout for plagiarism. But according to a letter to the National Institutes of Health from Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, plagiarism happens in medical documents in a practice known as ghostwriting.
The letter states ghostwriting is when drug and device companies hire a group to write a draft journal article and then have academic professors and researchers sign onto them as the lead author.
Jerome Kassirer, a professor at both the Tufts University School of Medicine and the Stanford University School of Medicine has spoken out against the practice in the past.
"It violates integrity. If an author signs his/her name to a manuscript, one should be able to assume that they are the real author and that they take responsibility for its content," Kassirer said in an e-mail. "It is also wrong because ghostwritten articles are often biased in favor of the company that had it written, and thus provide a false impression of the facts."
Kassirer went on to compare ghost writing to plagiarism.
"A plagiarist copies big chunks of text from an original manuscript into his/her own," Kassirer said. "A ghostwriter simply signs his/her name to material he or she did not write. The two are not all that different; both are deceptive practices."
Kassirer said no one really knows how often ghostwriting occurs in important medical research, but steps are being taken to prevent ghostwriting from occurring.
"Many journals are now requiring that authors attest that they are the sole authors of submitted manuscripts," Kassirer said.
Committee on Publication Ethics Chairwoman Liz Wager has been involved in developing an anti-ghostwriting checklist.
"Our COPE Best Practice guidelines recommend that editors should consider developing a transparency policy to encourage maximum disclosure about the provenance of non-research articles, adopt authorship or contributorship systems that promote good practice and discourage misconduct," Wager said in an e-mail.
MU spokesman Christian Basi said the School of Medicine does not have a policy dealing specifically with ghost writing.
"We don't have a specific policy that is dedicated to the issue of ghostwriting," Basi said. "We have policies that cover with research misconduct or plagiarism that this type of situation would fall under."
The Collected Rules and Regulations of MU states research misconduct is the fabrication, falsification or plagiarism in proposing, performing or reviewing research or in reporting research results.
According to this section of the university's rules, a finding of research misconduct requires there be a significant departure from accepted practices of the relevant research community, misconduct be committed intentionally, knowingly or recklessly and the allegation be proven by preponderance of the evidence.
A campus faculty committee is in charge of hearing any case involving a charge of research misconduct and each campus of the university has a standing committee to hear cases of research misconduct.
When addressing allegations of research misconduct, there are three principle phases: an inquiry as to whether the allegation has substance and that an investigation is warranted; an investigation which develops a case; and determination by the chancellor as to whether misconduct occurred.
"In the past 16 years, I cannot recall when ghostwriting has been an issue for our faculty," Basi said.