PLoS Medicine has generally impressed me with the amount of attention, as well as the validity of its substantive ethical positions, on the disgraceful prevalence of ghostwriting in biomedical scholarship.
Today they publish an editorial (forthcoming in the September 2009 issue, available now on the PLoS Medicine Blog) announcing the creation of a public database of over 1500 documents acquired through the discovery process in various lawsuits filed against pharmaceutical companies that detail the nature and extent of ghostwriting. Some choice excerpts from the editorial:
If you are an editor, author, reviewer, or reader of medical journals, or if you depend on your doctor or health care provider getting unbiased information from medical journals, then the 1,500 documents now hosted on the PLoS Medicine Web site should make you very concerned and angry. Because, quite simply, the story told in these documents amounts to one of the most compelling expositions ever seen of the systematic manipulation and abuse of scholarly publishing by the pharmaceutical industry and its commercial partners in their attempt to influence the health care decisions of physicians and the general public.
[ . . . ]
What’s clear is that ghostwriting can no longer be considered one of the “dirty little secrets” of medical publishing that nothing can be done about. While editors, medical schools, and universities have turned a blind eye to, or at the least failed to tackle head-on the pervasive presence of ghostwriting, drug companies and medical education and communication companies have built a vast and profitable ghostwriting industry.
And consider the authors almost plaintive query, "How did we get to the point that falsifying the medical literature is acceptable?"
How indeed.
There is too much I want to say to really begin the task of blogging about it, although the inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. I hope to wade through the database if I can stomach it, and may post further thoughts subsequent to the review.
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