Guest authorship as research misconduct: definitions and possible solutions

To advance healthcare and promote public trust, the integrity of medical research must be a high priority.1 Guest authorship (here encompassing gift, honorary, courtesy and coercive authorship) lists as ‘authors’ people who have not made substantial contributions to the work. It can occur: as fealty to supervisors, such as department chairs, laboratory directors or grant coordinators, who become authors on articles without making substantive contributions; as a means to enhance the esteem a paper receives by adding a preeminent name to the author list; or as a means to hide the publication’s origin in industry, as when a drug/device company designs, executes and writes a study’s report—without identifying its employees as authors in the resulting journal publication—then invites prominent physician(s) to serve as lead ‘author(s).’2 3 Here, the physicians are guest authors while company employees are ghost authors. Although both guest and ghost...

Source: Evidence-Based Medicine - January 19, 2023 Category: Internal Medicine Authors: Morreim, E. H., Winer, J. C. Tags: EBM analysis Source Type: research