Academics ‘guest authoring’ ghostwritten studies should be charged with fraud

By Eric W. Dolan

Academics who lend their names to medical and scientific articles ghostwritten by the pharmaceutical industry should be charged with fraud under the the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), according to two University of Toronto Faculty of Law professors.

The pharmaceutical industry often conducts research, but allows academic experts to submit it to scientific journals under their own name. Although medical professionals and academics have called for these "guest authors" to be sanctioned by journals, academic institutions and regulatory agencies, their recommendations have not been widely embraced.

"It's a prostitution of their academic standing," Professor Trudo Lemmens said. "And it undermines the integrity of the entire academic publication system."

In an article published Tuesday in PLoS Medicine, Professors Simon Stern and Trudo Lemmens argued that, "guest author's claim for credit of an article written by someone else constitutes legal fraud, and may give rise to claims that could be pursued in a class action based on the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act."

"Guest authorship is a disturbing violation of academic integrity standards, which form the basis of scientific reliability," they claimed. "Pharmaceutical sponsors borrow the names of academic experts precisely because of the value and prestige attached to the presumed integrity and independence of academic researchers."

Academics who lend their names to ghostwritten studies give false respectability to claims of safety and effectiveness that threaten to undermine the integrity of medical research and patient care, according to Stern and Lemmens. This false respectability extends to the courtroom as well, when the studies are used as evidence in lawsuits to support pharmaceutical companies' claims.

"Expert witness testimony comes into court through the agency of lawyers, who are officers of the court," they explain. "When a pharmaceutical company helps to produce ghostwritten articles and its lawyers cite them in court, the lawyers are, at the very least, reckless about the falsehood and they have a duty to disclose the truth."

Pharmaceutical lawyers who to treat ghostwritten articles as legally valid evidence should be charged with "fraud on the court."

"They are often used in litigation to support the manufacturer's arguments about a drug's efficacy and safety, or to establish a record of scientific acceptance for Daubert purposes, or to credentialize an expert witness," Stern and Lemmens wrote. "Each of those uses, if attempted by a party that had helped to create the article, could risk sanction."

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