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That's a Lot of Ghosts Out There

Sep 11, 2009

A study done by Journal of the American Medical Association editors released yesterday, though not peer-reviewed or published, found that a "significant number" of medical journal papers are written by ghostwriters, according to the New York Times. The online survey of the authors from 630 papers found that 7.8 percent of them left people off the paper whose contributions qualified them to be authors. Furthermore, the New England Journal of Medicine had the high rate of ghostwriting at 10.9 percent and the rates at other journals are as follows: 7.9 percent in JAMA, 7.6 percent in The Lancet, 7.6 percent in PLoS Medicine, 4.9 percent in The Annals of Internal Medicine, and 2 percent in Nature Medicine.

NEJM editors told the Times that they were "puzzled" by and "skeptical" of the results.

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