[PDF] Honorary and ghost authorship in high impact biomedical journals: a cross sectional survey | Semantic Scholar (2024)

FAQs

What is the prevalence of honorary and ghost authorship in Cochrane reviews? ›

Results: One hundred forty-one reviews (39%) had evidence of honorary authors, 32 (9%) had evidence of ghost authors (most commonly a member of the Cochrane editorial team), and 9 (2%) had evidence of both honorary and ghost authors.

All three types of authorship are at best opportunistic and at worse scientific misconduct [4]. Spinal Cord heeds the advice of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors on authorship, and strongly discourages gift, honorary or guest authorship.

Ghost authorship is when someone who substantially contributed to a study is left out of the author list. Gift authorship and guest authorship are when someone who doesn't qualify as an author is still given credit for being one. These situations are unethical (they're questionable research practices, QRPs).

A little over 50% of all books published in the United States are written by ghostwriters. That's an astonishing number, considering these guys remain largely invisible and unknown. But why do authors and publishers choose to work with ghostwriters? Well, the most common denominator has something to do with genre.

Which of the following most accurately describes the practice of ghost authorship? It is a situation where the individual who wrote the manuscript is not listed as an author.

However, ghost authorship can be used wrongly, such as to obscure potential conflict of interest in research. An example would be omitting the name of an employee of a pharmaceutical company that assisted the research into a particular drug.

Another unethical practice is that of ghostwriting. It is a phenomenon wherein individuals who write the articles are not named as authors and are not even acknowledged to be associated with the manuscript.

So in answer to the original question: If entire scholarly articles, books, and chapters are written by paid ghosts, and this is not disclosed in print, then this is a breach of publication ethics that undermines reliance on the record and misrepresents the president's scholarly output.

In the US, hiring a ghostwriter for an academic paper such as a dissertation or thesis is both unethical and potentially illegal. It is research misconduct. Different places have different laws, so it's hard to say what law might be broken.

Is ghostwriting dishonest? ›

The core issue of ghostwriting can be summarized in one word: dishonesty. Paying someone else to pass off their words as your own without giving proper credit is dishonest.

It is important to note that writing a paper solely for the purpose of career advancement or to pad your CV is not ethical. Honorary, gift, guest, or ghost authorship should be avoided at all costs. These practices undermine the integrity of the scientific community and the value of the research being conducted.

The ethics of ghostwriting can be a topic of debate. Some argue that it is deceptive or dishonest to present someone else's work as your own, while others view it as a legitimate service that helps individuals and organizations communicate effectively.

Unethical authorship refers to a kind of academic misconduct that unjustly names a person to be an author, removes his/her name from the study, or replaces his/her name with the name of other authors who have made little or no contribution to the research or writing of a manuscript.

Responsible and ethical authorship requires that the work be trustworthy, truthful and fair. Truthfulness means that false claims are not present, including the claim of authorship. False claims must be distinguished from errors or inaccuracies, which occur in up to 20% of manuscripts.