Plagiarism with a difference

How can a professor of medicine claim 800 authored or co-authored peer-reviewed articles in his career when most research academics struggle to write five a year? This is the question posed by Sergio Sismondo in a recent issue of the Canadian journal, Academic Matters. Sismondo, a professor of philosophy at Queen’s University, Ontario, said the answer lies at the heart of shonky pharmaceutical promotion activities dressed up as academic publishing. The international publishing giant Elsevier has recently been rocked by revelations of nine big pharma-sponsored Australian publications that were passed off as genuine, robust, peer-reviewed journals. Sismondo described another development, which provided individual academics with the avenue to contribute to several hundred journals, as “ghost management”. This involves the funding of research, much of it carried out by contract research organisations, the results of which are fed into manuscripts drafted either in-house or by specialist publication planners. The manuscripts are then “authored” by academic researchers. This may mean supplying the patients for the clinical trials, editing the article, or quite often just signing off on the draft. The articles are submitted to mainstream journals, where they enjoy a solid acceptance rate. The drug manufacturers then order vast quantities of reprints, which are distributed to medical practitioners en masse. This explains not just how some medical academics achieve almost bionic publication rates, but also why it is that “blockbuster” drugs are the subject of sometimes several thousand articles in the medical journals. Sismondo estimated that at least 40 per cent of these articles are generated by “ghost management”, and that some proportion of the remaining 60 per cent are managed by the pharmaceutical companies through other means. Sismondo told Campus Review his article in Academic Matters, which has relatively few references, is almost entirely lacking in data, and concerns a subject he’s already worked with, took him a concentrated week to write and submit. “If I did nothing else with my working life, I could write around 50 of these a year. But some academics, if their CVs are to be believed, achieve this sort of figure year in, year out.” The ghost management process, he writes, is driven as much by the aggressive marketing approach of the publication planning industry as by the clout of pharmaceutical companies. Journals too are willing collaborators. They profit substantially from advertising and reprints. Ghost-managed articles are reputed to be better written, and more likely to meet publishing deadlines, than articles genuinely authored by academics, Sismondo said. “The pharmaceutical industry is co-opting academic reputations and prestigious, nominally independent, publications for their own business ends. But it also raises serious questions about plagiarism and academic integrity,” he said. Sismondo said the real authors can be reluctant to allow the academics more than a light edit, because too many changes can require them to redraft the article. Similarly, academics are kept away from the raw data and are usually shown only a summary of the results. Authors of industry manuscripts are largely sidelined from the process of analysing, writing and publishing research, he writes, which amounts to plagiarism since they are willing participants in the deception. Sismondo said one way to curb the practice would be for the top 10 or 20 journals, such as the the British Medical Journal and the New England Journal of Medicine, to jointly announce that they would no longer publish any sponsored work. “Industry’s voice would still be heard, but in journals that overtly cater to them. The medical profession would quickly recognise the difference – which they mostly can’t do at present.” Sismondo said universities also need to take the issue more seriously. “It may be plagiarism by consent, but it’s still plagiarism,” he said. “The rules still apply.” Go to www.academicmatters.ca/current_issue.article.gk?catalog_item_id=2529&amp;category=/issues/MAY2009