Reader Comments
Post a new comment on this article
Post Your Discussion Comment
Please follow our guidelines for comments and review our competing interests policy. Comments that do not conform to our guidelines will be promptly removed and the user account disabled. The following must be avoided:
- Remarks that could be interpreted as allegations of misconduct
- Unsupported assertions or statements
- Inflammatory or insulting language
Thank You!
Thank you for taking the time to flag this posting; we review flagged postings on a regular basis.
closeDon't senior researchers write papers?
Posted by peterbyass on 09 Sep 2010 at 11:21 GMT
This query was in response to an e-mail from Karen Mittleman (a DesignWrite employee who supervised medical writers) that stated: “The beauty of this process is that we become your postdocs! … We provide you with an outline that you review and suggest changes to. We then develop a draft from the final outline. You have complete editorial control of the paper, but we provide you with the materials to review/critique”
http://plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.1000335#article1.body1.sec5.p1
In some ways the underlying assumption here - that senior researchers don't write their own papers anyway but rely on post-docs - is even worse than the ghostwriting saga itself! If it is really true that some senior researchers don't do a lot of their own research, analysis and writing, perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised that opportunities for ghostwriting have occurred.
RE: Don't senior researchers write papers?
sallysmithers replied to peterbyass on 09 Sep 2010 at 22:22 GMT
How can a drug company pay writers to write what they themselves dictate to be written and how is this legal? The drug company in this case wrote their own peer review research and paid professors and so called experts to enhance the approval of this drug? This is fraud and the researchers that knew this was happening are liable under law. That is why we have laws to prevent fraud and this was quite clearly a crime. Many women took this drug only to receive the side effect of breast cancer and those responsible should be in jail.