Ghostwriting

A recent commenter, Dan, suggested I check out some of Jeffrey Lacasse’s articles on ghostwriting. I’ve read two of Jeffrey’s articles: Ghostwriting and Academic Medicine and Knowledge of ghostwriting and financial conflicts-of-interest reduces the perceived credibility of biomedical research (both co-authored with Jonathan Leo), and found them excellent. Ghostwriting in this context, for readers not familiar with the term, works like this. A pharmaceutical company does a piece of research which establishes that their product is effective and safe. (There are various ways to ensure this result, and the pharmaceutical companies know them all.) Then they get one of their own technical writers to write the research up, but this writer’s name does not go on the report. Instead, the pharmaceutical company gets an eminent medical academic who has a financial link to the company to put his name on the piece, as if he were indeed the researcher and the author. ...