The Dirty Little Secret of Medical Publishing

Source: "Ghostwriting: The Dirty Little Secret of Medical Publishing That Just Got Bigger," The PLoS Medicine Editors (2009)

My friend Julianne identified this article for me.

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.

It appears that the editors have evidence that articles in their journal were ghostwritten by corporations specializing in medical writing, paid for by pharmaceutical companies that specified the nature of the report, and then published under the name of scientists uninvolved in the research.

Clearly the scientific peer review system is not designed to deal with this kind of problem. It undermines the credibility of information in the scientific literature.