New strategies to tackle medical ghostwriting are debated
Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - 05:21
in Health & Medicine
Better strategies to tackle ghostwriting in the medical literature are the subject of a debate by leading authors in next week's issue of the open-access journal PLoS Medicine. Ghostwriting is scientific misconduct, argues Peter Gotzsche, Director of the Nordic Cochrane Centre, Copenhagen, Denmark, because it is dishonest and often does not allow for proper accountability of the role of authors and study sponsors in the publication process. 'Court cases that allowed access to industry files have shown that ghost and guest authorship are common,' says Dr Gotzsche, citing a recent example involving the anti-inflammatory drug rofecoxib (Vioxx) in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)...