Transparency and trust: In defence of medical writers

doi:10.1136/bmj.329.7478.1345-a

BMJ 2004;329:1345 (4 December), doi:10.1136/bmj.329.7478.1345-a

Letter

Transparency and trust

In defence of medical writers

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR—If ghost writing is defined as what happens whenthe identity of a writer is concealed, then Abbasi's statement,"We know that ghost writing happens, and the identity and themotivations of the ghost writer are not revealed" is self evidentlytrue, albeit not very informative.¹ However, many people understandmedical ghost writing to mean that a professional medical writer,whose name does not appear on the author list, wrote the paper.When this happens, the identity of the writer is sometimes notrevealed, but it often is, usually in the acknowledgments section.It is therefore misleading to state that the identity of theghost writer is not revealed as though this were a universaltruth.

Kmietowicz's news article also misleads by saying that distinguishedauthors put their names to papers without ever seeing the rawdata.² This may be true but is hardly the whole story. What. . . [Full text of this article]

Adam Jacobs, director

Dianthus Medical Limited, London SW19 3TZ ajacobs@dianthus.co.uk