Penn Med does not condone ghostwriting

As a result of a letter Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) recently issued to ten top medical schools, the School of Medicine examined its current policies regarding "medical ghostwriting” and other forms of plagiarism.

Medical ghostwriting is a practice in which academics knowingly take credit for articles authored by outside writers — frequently affiliated with or subsidized by pharmaceutical companies. Penn Med does not condone ghostwriting, according to Penn Med Chief of Staff Susan Phillips.

The letter from Sen. Grassley requested that the schools respond by Dec. 8 with their respective ghostwriting and plagiarism policies, in addition to any complaints or investigations with respect to either practice they had addressed since 2004.

Journals across all disciplines are in the process of cracking down on this form of academic misrepresentation, according to Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics.

While similarities exist between ghostwriting and plagiarism, the practices are not identical.

Caplan characterized the two as “close cousins,” emphasizing that ghostwriting can almost be considered a “contract” of sorts, given that prominent academics are often solicited by pharmaceutical companies to lend their names to papers.

“There are companies that will approach people and say, we have a paper, we know you agree with it, we’ll write it for you if you agree to take credit for it,” he said.

By contrast, Caplan explained, plagiarism is more akin to theft as it entails taking an author’s work without their consent.

“In ghostwriting, the author knows there’s a ghost around,” Caplan said.

Penn Med, however, makes no distinction between ghostwriting and plagiarism.

According to Phillips, the school views any article or paper whose author was not personally involved with the research as an example of plagiarism.

The Faculty Handbook classifies ghostwriting as a “major infraction of University behavioral standards,” or “an action involving flagrant disregard of the rules of the University or of the customs of scholarly communities.”

She added that Penn Med was the first in the country “to establish these guidelines for interactions with pharmaceutical companies” and asserted that the school has faced “no allegations nor investigations of alleged ghostwriting by faculty or students” in the eight years she has been employed at Penn.

Ghostwriting is by no means limited to individual studies or articles — at times, entire publications are created under pharmaceutical company sponsorship.

“People need to realize that peer-reviewed journals are good, but a claim needs to demonstrate a good track record from many publications before it can be taken seriously,” Caplan cautioned. “There’s a need to educate the media and public that just because one paper says something’s true doesn’t make it so. There has to be confirmation and confirmation over time.”

He further affirmed the importance of remaining alert and aware of attempts to “spin” messages in articles, adding that the circulation of ghostwritten articles can result in the spread of erroneous information and the dissemination of literature lacking proper qualifications.

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