Sometimes the requirement for modern scholars to ‘publish or perish’ pressures authors into unethical short-cuts, plagiarism or ‘ghostwriting,’ but Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman of the Medical Center should be praised as a pinnacle of ethical excellence for her public exposure and denunciation of such practices.
Last summer, the medical education company RxComms approached Dr. Fugh-Berman with a pre-written manuscript on behalf of a pharmaceutical company named AstraZeneca. The manuscript did not explicitly endorse AstraZeneca’s product, but it highlighted the dangers of a rival drug. RxComms proposed that Fugh-Berman put a few minor edits into the manuscript and submit it to a major medical journal as her own work.
She refused, but a few weeks later she was coincidentally selected as a peer reviewer for a suspicious article submitted to the Journal of General Internal Medicine. The piece, Fugh-Berman stated in an article in the JGIM, was “a revised but recognizable version of the manuscript that had been previously sent to [Dr. Fugh-Berman].”
Her article, “The Corporate Co-author,” started an important dialogue in the medical community about the ramifications of ghostwriting, responsibility and possible solutions.
Martha Gerrity, co-editor of the JGIM, thinks that ghostwritten articles, especially those sponsored by pharmaceuticals, are a major issue for medical journals to address.
“Ghostwriting, especially with the purpose of promoting or ‘tilling the soil’ for a company’s product is intellectually dishonest and undermines the trust practitioners and the public have in the medical literature,” Gerrity said.
Doctors are unable to perform every experiment themselves, and depend upon the accuracy and impartiality of medical articles to make informed medical decisions. When big pharmaceutical companies camouflage their own articles as impartial studies, journals cannot have any credibility. Science should not be corrupted by corporate designs.
“[Ghostwriting] injects bias and untruth into the scientific dialogue in order to enhance corporate profits,” Dr. William Tierney and Dr. Martha Gerrity wrote in an editorial in the JGIM. “How much is sullying the medical literature worth in market share?”
Though most journals require that authors disclose all contributors, Fugh-Berman said she finds the honor system insufficient. She proposes an independent database of all conflicts of interest in medical literature. Such a database would allow cross-referencing that could detect subtle conflicts that editors normally miss.
Though corporate sponsorship is inevitable and does not necessarily discount the value of a study, eliminating bias is important. Without transparency, readers have no way of knowing whether or not a study is trustworthy. Fugh-Berman should be applauded for bringing this issue to light and for refusing to compromise herself just to get published, a step that is clearly acceptable to many other medical figures.
