Re: Ghostwriters!

On Apr 16, 12:17 am, Bill Penrose <penr...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
On Apr 15, 8:27 pm, Towse <s...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

We could ask Queen Chris.tine how many medical papers are written by
someone other than the lead author or anyone near the top of the list of
authors.

Every academic scientist depends for his career on a continuing influx
of grant money. It's not surprising that some are willing to bend
their principles slightly in order to keep the money flowing. Grant
money means prestige, relief from teaching obligations, official
appointments, more slaves/students in the lab, and lots of impressive
equipment. If you bring in enough grant money, the process becomes
self-perpetuating, and you become a Great Man.

Warriors in some civilizations collect scalps or shrunken heads, and
scientists collect publications in their curriculum vitae. It's not
unusual, and even expected, that close associates will put the Great
Man's name on a paper to boost its prestige and improve the likelihood
of its publication. Meanwhile, the Great Man gets another scalp for
his war shirt.

3. Put 1 and 2 together, and a 'scientist' (ghost writer) for a
funding source (drug company) will offer to put the Great Man's name
on a paper. Any uneasiness GM has about letting his name be used goes
away when the next grant comes in. Drug companies need his prestige,
the Great Man needs their money.

This isn't some paranoid notion of how scientific politics work. I
lived in it for the last three decades of my career. Not medical work,
but work for government agencies, large companies, small companies. I
never was a Great Man, but I worked for one as primo capo and
consiglieri most of that time.

Interesting to see if Chris.tine agrees with me.

DB

Hi all.

Where to begin? Sal's right: this is something I've studied a lot.

First point: ghostwriting is specifically disapproved by the
scientific publishing community. So is its alter ego, "guest
authorship," which is when you stick the chair's name into all
publications originating from his department, even if all he did was
get in the way of your research time.

A movement's been afoot for decades to change "authorship" to
"contributorship" or "guarantorship," because single authored papers
hardly exist any more. What this means is that everyone who
contributes to a scientific paper discloses the nature of her
contribution to the paper.

Odder woids, someone like me, a medical editor (not a ghostwriter)
would be credited thus: "Queen Chris.tine provided substantive editing
to early and final versions of this paper."

Second point, there are (at least) two differing factions in medical
publication.

One is big pharma, which is the group all the fuss is about. Big
pharma funds publishing mills. "Ghostwriters" are called consultants
or other names and get fed data and paid big bucks to turn out the
papers with other folks names on them. It's efficient but violates the
purity of the scientific method, which calls for transparency and
authorial responsibility.

The other is old, shabby, underfunded, medical academic publishing,
where faculty in medical schools struggle to teach, see patients, do
research, publish, and hunt down grants. A few people like me who
ascribe to the biases of medical academia work with faculty to write
and publish their work. It's an intensive, iterative process that
involves sending the author back to rewrite, with guidance,
sometimes.

I insist that authors acknowledge me, not for vanity but for the
sunshine principle. If my editing goes deep and crosses the line into
authorship (original contribution/research/etc.), then I expect to be
named as a co-author.

Third point: some research has been done about whether the order of
author names is meaningful. While the first author usually is the
major contributor, often the person who's contributed second most
shows up last, especially in the case of biostatisticians and other
non-MD analytic types.


Penrose, you're quite right about the culture there. But remember that
only a portion of medical research is bench or even clinical research.
But the money's in pharma, so that's where the research goes. It's not
necessarily where the best answers lie. . .

Boots, shows what you know. Harumph.

And it's WesKAHNsin. . .

..tine


.

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