It's now widely known that pharmaceutical companies hire ghost-writers to write articles for medical journals, even prestigious ones, and recruit physicians as the lead author of the pieces. ProPublica recently published a revealing exposé of the sordid details (see: Dollars for Docs). On the basis of the ProPublica revelations, I suspect that a number of these "docs-for-hire" are basically de facto employees of the drug companies in the sense that much of their yearly income come from the companies for lectures and other services. However, I am interested in the rationale for academics to get involved in these activities (see: Medical Schools Contribute to the Problem of Ghost-Written Faculty Articles; Details Emerge About Ghost-Written Medical Articles for Wyeth). The blog Scholarly Kitchen recently published an interview with an anonymous ghost-writer for the pharmaceutical industry. Read the whole piece if you are interested but here's a juicy quote:
Q: Litigation against Merck regarding Vioxx revealed that academics were routinely recruited and paid to put their names on articles they had little (if any) involvement in producing, for the explicit purpose of creating credibility for the study. Is this a common practice?
[A:] In my experience, the pharmaceutical company would pay a communications/marketing company to write the manuscript, who would then go out and find academics who would be willing to become the “authors” of the manuscript and paid an honorarium. I’ve worked with some authors who do absolutely nothing on the manuscript, requiring an additional ghostwriter to be hired, and still demand an honorarium for their time. These academics are willing to enter into this relationship because of the importance of authorship to their careers. You can’t entirely blame the pharma company. Universities encourage academics to play this game.
No great surprises here -- the academics allow their names to be used on ghosted article both for the money and to expand their CVs. This latter factor may be the driving force. I would also be surprised if their medical school deans and clinical departmental chairpersons had no inkling that this was going on. I would predict that the incriminated faculty members will always be involved in a set of relationships and transactions with the offending pharmaceutical company. It's easy to say that such companies only provide research funding to the faculty members but there needs to be full disclosure of exactly who has written all published article. Many of the ghost-writers still remain hidden.
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