Ghostwriting: the importance of definition and its place in contemporary drug marketing

During the past decade, the pharmaceutical publications trade has campaigned to persuade medicine, journals, ethicists, and the media that it is opposed to ghostwriting. Yet industry practices have changed little, and commercial drafting of clinical trial reports, consensus statements, and reviews that are authored by recruited academics remains routine. Here, I show that industry’s opposition is based on a redefinition of the term ghostwriting that obscures the continued, widespread use of the practice as originally defined in medical journal literature. I also argue that the ghostwriting debate has deflected attention from the broader set of strategies through which marketing influences medical publications. The use of writers, regardless of whether they are called ghosts, is just one of several options for building commercial perspectives into academic literature, then spinning their attribution to strengthen credibility.