Medical ghostwriters are employed by pharmaceutical companies and medical-device manufacturers to produce apparently independent manuscripts for peer-reviewed journals, conference presentations and other communications.
The term "ghostwriting" is often used to encompass all three of these practices.The rules for authorship and contribution of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE, informally known as "the Vancouver Group" from the locale of the group's first meeting, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada) are a single, universally-respected set of guidelines for describing authorship of and contribution to professional medical publications.
The ICMJE document "Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals: Publishing and Editorial Issues Related to Publication in Biomedical Journals: Corrections, Retractions and "Expressions of Concern"[6] is the section of the ICMJE Uniform Requirements laying out guidelines for how potential or actual scientific error and scientific fraud ought to be dealt with.
[15] Professor Trudo Lemmens of the University of Toronto Faculty of Law argues that ghostwritten papers help protect companies when they are sued in court.
It would seem obvious that someone employed as a “medical writer” would be an author, but current dialogue on ghostwriting ignores such common-sense interpretations.
Listing ghost authors as editorial assistants allows pharmaceutical companies to publish articles with conflicts-of interest that are not transparently reported.
The study examined the use of Paxil in adolescents and concluded, “Paroxetine is generally well tolerated and effective for major depression in adolescents.” Several years after the paper was published, court proceedings revealed internal company documents admitting that the study found that Paxil was not any better than placebo on the pre-registered outcome measures, and that the company was concerned about how to manage the negative findings.
[1] A questionnaire using comparable methods in 2005 and 2008 with a 14-28% response rate found a decrease in number of people who reported ghostwriting among professional medical writers.
Reprints of the articles can be distributed to doctors in their offices or at medical meetings by drug company representatives in lieu of product brochures.