Ghostwriting: Stringent Disclosure Policies Take Aim at Authorship Abuses

Abstract

In recent years, there has been an evolution, or at least heightened awareness, of ethics in medical journal publishing. Issues surrounding author conflicts of interest have been discussed frequently in the literature1-3 and now the surprisingly common practice of article ghostwriting is also receiving well-deserved (and long overdue) scrutiny. Aesthetic Surgery Journal has positioned itself at the forefront of these developments in journal publishing through increasingly stringent disclosure policies applied to both authors and reviewers of manuscripts. Our most recent disclosure document (“Verification of Authorship”) is aimed at ensuring that individuals listed as authors have actually had substantial involvement in research and manuscript preparation and that any assistance provided by other individuals and/or entities is openly acknowledged. It has been a longstanding (though largely unacknowledged) practice in the world of medical publishing for professional writers or researchers to sometimes be paid by pharmaceutical and medical device companies to develop articles that are subsequently attributed to physician or academic authors whose actual involvement may be minimal. A survey by editors of the Journal of the American Medical Association ( JAMA ), which was reported by The New York Times and other media outlets, revealed that 7.8 percent of the corresponding authors of 630 articles appearing in a number of top medical journals in 2008 admitted (via an anonymous survey) that unacknowledged ghostwriters contributed to their published manuscripts. …