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Most leading US medical schools lack rules on ghostwriting

BMJ 2010; 340 doi: 10.1136/bmj.c799 (Published 8 February 2010)
Cite this as: BMJ 2010;340:c799

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  1. Janice Hopkins Tanne
  1. 1New York

    A survey of the top 50 US medical schools found that only 13 have policies prohibiting ghostwriting of scientific articles, a new report has found.

    Last year the US Institute of Medicine recommended that US academic medical centres prohibit ghostwriting by their teaching staff.

    One of the paper’s coauthors, Jeffrey Lacasse, from Arizona State University in Phoenix, told the BMJ, “This is one of the most pressing problems in evidence based medicine . . . Nobody has ever been sanctioned [for cooperating in ghostwriting].”

    The authors wrote, “Even beyond frank misrepresentation of data, commercially driven ghostwritten articles shape the medical literature . …

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