According to the Oxford English Dictionary definition, a ghostwriter refers to a hacker writer who does a job and hands over responsibility for it to another person.
Any document, book or article that is written without the author’s signature is a ghost-written work. This is what dictionary definitions report. However, academic medicine has long ignored this fact. The medical academy has, over the past decades, had a lot of literature that is ghostwritten, which other university communities do not allow. For clinicians and patients, a medical research paper that endorses drugs has authority, especially when it mentions well-known professors from scientific and teaching centres.
Literature that is ghostwritten is very common and has negative consequences. Clinical trial descriptions of drugs such as Avandia, Zyprexa, Vioxx, Paxil, Zoloft, and Fen-phen and hormone replacement therapy include ghostwriters. This has caused much excitement because the makers of these drugs are involved in litigation over substandard products that are harmful to health. No one expected the medical evidence to be collected by ghostwriters.
Now the issue of ghost works has come to the public. Many doctors, scientists, and medical literature editors are paying attention to this and trying to make changes. It is, therefore, appropriate to clarify which work can be considered to be written by a ghost. Ghost authors and companies like StudiBucht are usually hired for many reasons. In many cases, public figures do not have the time, discipline, or writing skills to write and research a drug into several pages or a book with practical recommendations. Even if a public figure has the skills to write a short article, they may not know how to structure and edit work to make it exciting and dynamic. In other cases, publishers use ghost authors to increase the number of books that can be published each year on behalf of well-known, high-demand authors, or to quickly release a theme book. However, it must be assumed that if the scientific work is not signed by the author who wrote it, then the work can be considered to have been written by a ghost.
The money issue is irrelevant
And when you look outside, you might be distracted by the fact that a lot of people agree to sign for money a paper that they did not write. Many renowned medical professors and researchers have made such a deal. However, it must be taken into account that money questions about authorship are ethical issues, the main problem of ghost works remains unresolved.
What follows from all this?
When writing medical articles, pharmaceutical companies pay professional writers to draft articles and then pay other scientists or doctors to attach their names to these articles before they are published in medical or scientific journals. Medical extraneous text has been criticized by various professional bodies representing the pharmaceutical industry, publishers and medical societies and it may violate laws prohibiting the promotion of medicines inappropriately. This has recently attracted the attention of the general press and legislators. Professional medical writers can write articles without being listed as contributors to the article and without being considered ghostwriters, provided that their role is recognized. Moreover, the experience of professional medical writers in presenting scientific evidence can be useful in producing higher quality articles. Many papers are collaborative projects between pharmaceutical companies and it is not difficult to list all authors.
The International Committee of Medical Journal Experts (ICMJE) must better regulate authorship in order to restore the reputation of medical research. To that end, a special declaration should be made excluding the participation of ghost authors, which would have to be signed by each author who placed the manuscript in a medical journal. This simple procedure guarantees a new level of progress and will help to eliminate the negative influence of the works written by ghost authors.
Steps to solving the problem of ghost literature
The main purpose of ICMJE in creating the Uniform Requirements was to assist authors and editors in their joint task of producing and disseminating clear, accessible biomedical research reports. The initial sections focus on ethical issues arising in the evaluation, editing and publication of manuscripts in biomedical journals, as well as relations between editors, authors, reviewers and the media. The following sections deal with the technical aspects of the preparation and submission of manuscripts for publication. Authorship should be based on the following principles: 1) substantial contribution to the conception and design of the study, data acquisition, analysis and interpretation; 2) writing the first draft of the article or substantially revising it to improve its quality; 3) final approval of the print version. It is worth noting that although these rules are adhered to, this does not completely solve the problem of “ghosting”.
To take a very simple situation as an example. Suppose there is a medical writer who is funded and he writes a paper together with academy researchers. Almost the entire draft is written by Ghostwriter Medizin, introducing important points and editing. But in order to finish the work and get the finished article, he hands it over to the academy researchers, thereby not participating in the approval of the finished version. This creates a situation that according to ICMJE rules the author cannot be the one who has not approved the final version. It follows from this the situation that those concerned have followed all the rules and the problem of the ghostwriter does not go away.
As more and more attention is beginning to be paid to the problem of ghostwriters, there have also emerged those journals which have made more radical reforms on the politics of authorship. A prime example is a journal Neurology. It draws attention to all those who influenced the creation of a paper in the process and requires that every medical staff member be listed as an author. The journal Neurology introduces a new definition of a ghostwriter. This is a hidden, irrespective of monetary issue, author who has made a significant intellectual contribution to the manuscript created. This definition was created for the medical literature and the results of this approach can be assessed in the near future. Nevertheless, these are significant steps in addressing the problem of ghostwriting for the medical field.
