Medical Literature Imprinting by Pharma Ghost Writing: A Scientometric Evaluation

Introduction Misappropriation of authorship, honorary or ghost authorship, undermines academic publishing with a substantial proportion of peer-reviewed medical journals targeted (Flanagin, 1998). Pharmaceutical companies pay professional writers or medical communication companies to produce papers whilst paying other scientists or physicians to attach their names to these papers before they are published in medical or scientific journals. This ghost management is meant to support the marketing of drug products (Sismondo, 2007). Companies use this strategy to communicate competitive message, promote unproven off-label uses, and mitigate perceived drug risks (Fugh-Berman, 2010). Publication planning strategy with fraudulent practices were revealed through internal company communications in the course of the well-known Neurontin® litigation case (Vedula, 2012). Even though ghostwriting realized by pharmaceutical companies has been reported, it remains necessary to measure to what extent ghostwritten articles have impacted medical literature. Healy and Catell (2003) started to answer this question with a sample of 16 ghostwritten articles about a peculiar antidepressant. This pioneering analysis should be extended to a larger collection of ghostwritten articles as well as studied for a longer period of time.