Exorcising Ghosts and Unwelcome Guests

Ghosts and guests haunt medical journals. We don't usually notice them, but they occasionally rattle their chains, making us acutely aware of their presence. The author of an article we published in 2003 (1) sent more than a few shivers up the spines of the editors when he admitted to a New York Times reporter in 2005, “Merck designed the trial, paid for the trial, ran the trial…Merck came to me after the study was completed and said, ‘We want your help to work on the paper.’ The initial paper was written at Merck, and then was sent to me for editing” (2). Spooked by this evidence that authorship is not always what it seems, we reflect on practices that cast dark shadows across scientific publications: guest authoring and ghostwriting.

Guest authoring is the practice in which the names of individuals who did not contribute substantially to the paper appear on the byline. Like invited guests, these authors enjoy their stay on the byline without having to prepare beforehand or clean up afterward. In ghostwriting, individuals who wrote the paper are not acknowledged. These writers are as invisible as ghosts. In other words, guest authors accept authorship positions that exaggerate their contributions and ghostwriters accept positions (including no position at all) that understate their contributions. Both practices violate the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors' basic principles of authorship, which state, “All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship, and all those who qualify should be listed” (3). Guests and ghosts also defy the pharmaceutical industry's principles of good publication practice (4).

A recent study raised alarms about the frequency of guest …