Profits and plagiarism: the case of medical ghostwriting.
This paper focuses on medical ghostwriting in the United States. I argue that medical ghostwriting often involves plagiarism and, in those cases, can be treated as an act of research misconduct by both the federal government and research institutions. I also propose several anti-ghostwriting measures, including: 1) journals should implement guarantor policies so that researchers may be better held accountable for their work; 2) research institutions and the federal government should explicitly prohibit medical ghostwriting and outline appropriate penalties; and 3) a publicly available database should be created to record researchers' ethics violations.
Anekwe
Tobenna D
TD
Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA. tanekwe@hsph.harvard.edu
D000047:Academies and Institutes / Q000941:ethics; D001319:Authorship; D016265:Conflict of Interest; D003284:Contract Services / Q000941:ethics; D016208:Databases, Factual; D030881:Disclosure / Q000941:ethics; D004345:Drug Industry / Q000941:ethics; D035081:Editorial Policies; D035082:Federal Government; D033161:Government Regulation; D017408:Guidelines as Topic; D006801:Humans; D010506:Periodicals as Topic / Q000941:ethics* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D015714:Plagiarism; D011643:Publishing / Q000941:ethics / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D015871:Scientific Misconduct / Q000941:ethics* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D014481:United States; D014495:Universities / Q000941:ethics; D014956:Writing