{"id":610,"date":"2014-11-07T16:35:26","date_gmt":"2014-11-07T14:35:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/?p=610"},"modified":"2014-11-07T16:35:26","modified_gmt":"2014-11-07T14:35:26","slug":"ghost-un-authorships","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/2014\/11\/07\/ghost-un-authorships\/","title":{"rendered":"Ghost un-authorships"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m currently reading Ben Goldacre’s Bad Pharma<\/a>, in which he documents all the naughty things done by the Pharma industry. One of the many infelicities he mentions is their habit of ghostwriting academic papers, and then asking an academic to put their name on the paper (whilst hiding the involvement of the company). This is obviously a bit naughty, so the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors<\/a> (ICMJE) wrote up some criteria for authorship<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The ICMJE recommends that authorship be based on the following 4 criteria:<\/p>\n

Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
\n Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND
\n Final approval of the version to be published; AND
\n Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and anyone who doesn’t meet all of those criteria shouldn’t be an authors, but should be acknowledge. Goldacre, bless his little cotton socks, points out that this means that many people who contributed (e.g. those who ran the trials, and the people who wrote the paper – in other words the people from the bad pharma company) aren’t credited as authors. Which is true, but he ignores the other side of the coin. A couple of pages before discussing the ICMJE guidelines he quotes an academic, Dr. Lisse, who told the New York Times<\/a><\/p>\n

“Merck designed the trial, paid for the trial, ran the trial,” Dr. Lisse said. “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 it was sent to me for editing.” … “Basically, I went with the cardiovascular data that was presented to me,”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now, I’m not sure this qualifies Dr. Lisse to be an author under the guidelines, so perhaps he should be removed as an author. Which then raises an interesting idea. What if none of the authors fulfils the criteria? Could we then see the authorless paper?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m currently reading Ben Goldacre’s Bad Pharma, in which he documents all the naughty things done by the Pharma industry. One of the many infelicities he mentions is their habit of ghostwriting academic papers, and then asking an academic to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-friday-fun","category-science-publishing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=610"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}