{"id":829,"date":"2014-01-16T07:51:05","date_gmt":"2014-01-16T10:51:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.scielo.org\/en\/?p=829"},"modified":"2016-01-15T16:33:55","modified_gmt":"2016-01-15T18:33:55","slug":"ethical-editing-ghostwriting-is-an-unhealthy-practice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.scielo.org\/en\/2014\/01\/16\/ethical-editing-ghostwriting-is-an-unhealthy-practice\/","title":{"rendered":"Ethical Editing \u2013 Ghostwriting is an unhealthy practice"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Image: SciELO.<\/p><\/div>\n

The term Ghostwriter<\/i> is <\/b>defined as <\/b>a professional writer who is employed to write works for which he will receive no official credit but will instead remain anonymous. This has been a very common practice since time immemorial when secretaries and scribes used to write speeches and letters for their country\u2019s leaders, or the pupils of a particular teacher would complete their master\u2019s work under his direction and sometimes after his death. Even today, it is customary for presidents to give public speeches which have been written by someone else, or for ghostwriters to respond to letters written to citizens in the name of the president. They may even be contracted to write their \u201cautobiographies\u201d. Ghostwriting also frequently occurs in the world of journalism, in the production of comics, and some encyclicals have even been written for Popes by ghostwriters.<\/p>\n

What is wrong with this ? Nothing. But\u2026.in the world of academic studies in general and the field of research in particular, ghostwriting is also considered to be a form of plagiarism, unethical behavior which could even go as far as to cause health problems for the population, with corresponding legal repercussions. Let\u2019s investigate this further.<\/p>\n

The ghostwriter is a resource frequently used by university students who must present <\/b>a piece of written work to enable them to graduate, a Masters and even a post-graduate thesis, and for this they contract professional writers who do the work for them. As a result of this practice, \u201cpaper writing factories\u201d have come into existence which levy a charge to write all kinds of academic works. These have sprung up by the dozen over the last ten years, offering their services on-line. The basic services offer previously written essays at affordable prices, but a \u201cpersonalized\u201d writing service is also offered at a higher price, which frequently ranges from US$10 to US$50 per page.<\/p>\n

The problem is even more critical when we get into the field of academic research and that of publications which appear in peer-reviewed journals. The ghostwriter is encountered most frequently in health sciences journals, and marginally so in other research disciplines. But how frequently does ghostwriting occur or how extensive is it? To get an idea of this, we carried out some research using Google Scholar (our enquiries were carried out on 10\/11\/2013).<\/p>\n

For our first enquiry we searched for the general term ghostwriting <\/i>and obtained 9,570 results. As many of the results related to journalism in general or to the publishing industry, we reduced the scope of the enquiry by limiting our search query by using the terms \u201cresearch\u201d or \u201cacademic\u201d, excluding the sub-set \u201c-students\u201d, only searching for items published in 2013, and excluding citations and patents. We finally obtained a result of 199 published articles, almost all of them relating to the field of biomedicine. Almost 200 articles produced in only 10 months of this year, not an insignificant number!<\/p>\n

Ghostwriting can constitute serious unethical behavior and could also be a form of plagiarism<\/h3>\n

It may come as a surprise that ghostwriting can be thought of as a form of plagiarism, but this is how it is defined in dictionaries. People and institutions also have the same opinion when referring to the matter.<\/p>\n

For example, The Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy (Diccionario de la Real Academia Espa\u00f1ola<\/i> \u2013 DRAE) gives as the first meaning of \u201cplagiar<\/i>\u201d<\/p>\n

plagiar<\/i><\/p>\n

(From the Latin \u201cplagiare\u201d)<\/i><\/p>\n

1\u00a0<\/i>tr. To copy in their entirety, the works of others, passing them off as one\u2019s own.<\/i><\/p>\n

Likewise, in English, The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines plagiarism<\/i> as<\/p>\n

to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own to use (another’s production) without crediting the source<\/i><\/p>\n

Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) considers that ghostwriting <\/i>could in some cases be treated as a case of plagiarism. This viewpoint is expressed at least twice in a report produced by the US Senate and commented upon later in this document, and again in an article which appeared recently in the journal Bioethics<\/i>. Lastly, in a work published on the\u00a0 iThenticate blog, a company which specializes in offering plagiarism detection services, it states that<\/p>\n

Based on these definitions, the concept of ghostwriting at its base level is plagiarism. After all, the whole point of ghostwriting is to hide credit from the real author and instead recognize another source. However, there are several factors based on different methods of ghostwriting that make the subject not black and white. <\/b>\u00a0(2011)<\/p>\n

In other words, the ghostwriter can be both acceptable and unacceptable.<\/p>\n

Technology has fostered global research and global health, but has also allowed deception to take place on a global scale. Journal editors have not made significant advances in the use of technology or in formulating appropriate policies to identify dishonesty, or combat it.<\/p>\n

In the case of a doctoral thesis produced by a ghostwriter, the candidate fraudulently presents the work of another as his own. This action is defrauding both the institution which awarded the degree as well as future employers for whom the possession of a PhD is a requirement for the job.<\/p>\n

Ghostwriters are also used on some occasions by academics and active researchers who contract with <\/b>researchers who are unemployed, underemployed or occupying lowly positions to write articles and books without recognition of their role as author. This practice is not limited to medical researchers, although they constitute the majority of cases. We must make it clear that ghostwriters are not the same thing as professional medical writers. It can happen that a group of researchers may contract a professional writer to edit a document based on original research data, but it is the researchers who continue to maintain control of the written work by blocking marketing messages that are favorable to companies or products.<\/p>\n

The use of\u00a0 the ghostwriter in medical journals causes ethical and legal problems. This concern is due to the fact that pharmaceutical companies and the industries which produce medical technology may frequently distort the results produced by clinical trials. They may also not be impartial. These articles prepared by medical writers hired by the industries are then given to certain \u201cinvited authors\u201d who put their name to them in return for payment. The articles are then usually sent to commercial journals with a high impact factor, and for this reason it is more attractive to invited researchers to put their name to them because of the boost that these articles will give to their own careers.<\/p>\n

This behavior creates obvious conflicts of interest, distorts medical evidence, affects consumers by their bias towards certain drugs which has, as its objective, the approval of the drugs by health officials for inclusion in the Formularies used by health institutions, in many cases with preference to generic drugs. These fraudulent works that encourage dishonesty do become possible risks in serving the poorest of patients, since emerging markets use the research published in developed countries to produce advanced therapies.<\/p>\n

But what of the medical responsibilities of these companies when faced with a lawsuit? In court, lawyers paid by these companies will present those studies as scientific evidence to contradict independent research that questions the effectiveness of these drugs. In other words, a pharmaceutical company pays a ghostwriter to write an article in support of a drug, which then gets published in a major journal with a high Impact Factor. Then, if there is a lawsuit which goes to court, the lawyers present those articles as scientific evidence, thus closing the case.<\/p>\n

And what do those high Impact Factor journals do, and what do the reviewers do? In general, the ghostwriter is not detected by the reviewers, since the evidence emerges often years later and only in cases that end up in court. That is, the ghostwriter is not easy to detect and because of this is labelled \u201cghost\u201d.<\/p>\n

So, how prevalent is ghostwriting, and what kind of journals lend themselves to this practice, making it a matter of concern?<\/p>\n

A recent investigation by the US Senate into scandals related to ghostwriters has shown that this is a common practice in many schools of medicine at renowned universities such as Stanford, Harvard, McGill, Mount Sinai Medical Center, Yale and so on. Also this investigation shows how dozens of the most prestigious medical journals were involved in the approval of pharmaceutical products that are distributed globally, such as Avandia, Tylenol and hormonal therapies for menopause.<\/p>\n

The following studies should be noted:<\/p>\n