Plagiarism plagues many scholarly fields, and medical research is no exception.
In November, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, wrote a letter to Duke and the other medical schools ranked as the top 10 by U.S. News & World Report, asking them to crack down on medical ghostwriting and outline their policies by Dec. 8. All 10 schools have responded to the letter, and the senator and his staff are currently evaluating the responses, said Jill Gerber, Grassley’s press secretary.
Ghostwriting, the publication of information written chiefly by people other than the attributed author, typically occurs in published review articles or summaries in which the real data source is less visible, said Dr. Ross McKinney, director of the Duke Trent Center for Bioethics.
Duke’s response to Grassley described the University’s previously established policy, which McKinney called a “passive approach” to combat the practice.
“Our reaction to the senator is that if we found an article, we would sit down and talk with the Duke author,” he said.
Ghostwriting is defined and condemned in the Guidelines for Authorship and Authorship Dispute Resolution, a document included in Appendix P of the Duke University Faculty Handbook. The policy was approved March 2008.
The policy has yet to be tested, however, as there have been no cases of ghostwriting raised to this date, McKinney said.
Vice Provost for Research James Siedow also noted the absence of ghostwriting cases at Duke.
“The policy came about not so much because so much ghostwriting was going on, but because we were running into problems with conduct charges [that] were not disputes over authorship,” Siedow said.
Other top-10 medical schools have ghostwriting policies similar to Duke’s.
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine’s guidelines are outlined in its Medicine Policy on Interaction with Industry, as well as in its Rules and Guidelines for Responsible Conduct of Research. Similarly, the University of Washington School of Medicine established a Ghost Authorship Policy in August 2007.
“We have taken the position that... if the faculty is not compliant and it comes to our attention, there will be consequences,” said Dr. Wylie Burke, chair of the bioethics and humanities department at the University of Washington. “That’s the position our school is taking as opposed to a monitoring system.”
Dr. Evan Kharasch, professor and chief of the division of clinical and translational research at Washington University in St. Louis, said WashU is also actively denouncing ghostwriting.
“[Our policy] is very explicit, defines what is acceptable and unacceptable authorship and includes ghost authorship as unacceptable,” Kharasch said.
The University of Pennsylvania is one institution that does not have a specific policy on ghostwriting. Dr. Arthur Caplan, director of UPenn’s Center for Bioethics, said the university is addressing such violations through education instead.
“We do teach ethics courses for medical students and [graduate and post-doctoral] students where authorship requirements are addressed,” Caplan said.
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