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

I wrote a loooonnnggg response to this yesterday. It disappeard. I'll
try again.

You're right about big pharma and much (but not all) of clinical
medical research. But there's the rub: only a small amount of what we
need to learn about health and disease as they play out in the human
being has anything to do with pharmaceuticals. But that's where the
funding lamp sheds its light, so that's where the researchers look for
the keys they lost blocks away.

There are two widely divergent cultures in medical research
publishing. Big pharma, with the money, pumps data into research
dissemination tanks where well-paid consultants (aka ghostwriters)
churn out the copy.

This violates scientific principles of transparency and accountablity,
at minimum.

The "rule" agreed to internationally by the editors of medical
journals is that authors/contributors are the people who design the
study, do the research, analyze the data, and write the paper. There's
even a formula that says you have to do three of those functions to be
an author.

Outside of pharma, this rule is honored more than you'd think,
although some fields still have chairs who insist on being given
"honorary" authorship, and too many MD researchers fail to credit
biostatisticians and other PhD analytic types who contribute
substantially and SHOULD be called authors.

In the other culture, medical academia, faculty hustle to teach,
research, write, see patients, and stalk the increasingly endangered
federal grant. They hate writing, most of them. Still, more and more
department chairs are issuing edicts forbidding the use of editors,
who they mistake for ghostwriters, because of stories like the one
that precipitated this thread.

A few enlightened places pay for medical editors who ascribe to the
quaint academic values. Which means we spend (or spent, in my case,
before my job was eliminated) a lot of time sending authors back to
their computers to rewrite and teaching them how to do it, with a
pretty clear understanding of what is editing and what is authorship.

In this old school way, editors are acknowledged ("Queen Chris.tine
provided substantive editing to early and final drafts of this
study"). When we do original work, research, writing, we insist on
being listed as co-authors. This is not about ego but faithfulness to
the belief in transparency and accountability.

It's a hell of a lot less efficient, more time consuming, and just
plain better. But no one wants to fund it or devote the time to it
anymore. So more and more docs get grants and never disseminate their
findings.

I no longer belong to the American Medical Writers Association because
there's little place left in it for people like me, the dinosaurs.
Still, there are folks out there who still value and pay for what we
do the old fashioned way. Every now and again one of 'em pays me.

Bill, the research shows that the first author usually is the first
author, but after that order doesn't reflect the size of contribution.
The average paper has. . . I dunno, about 5 authors these days. The
last author is about equally likely to have not much to do with the
paper -- and to be the real first author or second most influential
author.

Boots, shows what you know. Also, it's WesKAHNsin.

..tine
.

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