Currently, professionals in the UK are encouraged to practice under a model of best-evidence. The primary source of this evidence that informs practice is reasearch published in professional journals such as British Journal of Psychiatry or European Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. However, it is stimated that around 10% of articles publised are ghostwritten, that is, completed by companies who have an invested interest in the data presented and signed by professionals, in same cases from very prestigious institutions, who had minimal or no participation at all in the research/writing process.
This practice is very serious because it means that practitioners are basing their interventions on fabricated data, unknowingly following the agenda, financial in most cases, of private companies.
While this practice affects the editorial policies of all professional journals in all fields, I target this campaign to BJP and EJCAP since articles in their respective journals have been recently documented as ghostwritten.
David Rothman completed an expert witness report in October 2010, hired by the Texas Attorney General's office in a lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson. This company had incurred in unethical practices to promote their most recent psychotropic drug, risperidone. Among those practices was the preparation of ghostwritten articles. The process of creation of several of them is extensively documented by Rothman. They include and article by Khanna et al, "Risperidone in the Treatment of Acute Mania: Double-blind, Placebo-Controlled Study", published by BJP in 2005 and another one by Jensen et al, "Management of Psychiatric Disorders in Children and Adolescents with Atypical Antipsychotics: a Systematic Review of Published Clinical Trials", published by EJCAP in 2007. In spite of the documentation showing the ghostwritten process of the above articles, they still can be accessed in the online version of the journals with no warnings. The result is that risperidone is still a prescribed psychotropic drug with little knowledge among professionals regarding the fabricated data that supposedly support its benefits.
Therefore, I would like BJP and EJCAP to publish a policy re ghostwritten articles, e.g. what they consider by that, how they propose to ensure the rightful authorship of articles published by their journals and, more importantly, how will they warn past and future readers of articles uncovered as ghostwritten once already published.
This is a matter that not only affects the prestige of professional journals, the integrity of authors who can be stained by this suspicion, but also practitioners and the populations they serve, that see in this way interventions being favoured on the basis of fabricated, in some cases completely erroneos, data.