Researchers who don’t write aren’t researchers

April 16th, 2008 Stewart Posted in writing |

Merck ghostwrote major drug trials and published them under the researchers’ names.

Sadly, there is really nothing all that shocking about this. It’s a well-known, little-discussed fact in modern medical academe: If a drug company foots the bill on your research, odds are they’ll also write up your results for you, thank you very much.

Here’s an astonishing quote from the NYT write-up:

A third author, also not named on the initial draft, was Dr. Louis Kirby, currently the medical director for the company Provista Life Sciences. In an e-mail message on Tuesday, Dr. Kirby said that as a clinical investigator for the study he had enrolled more patients, 109, than any of the other researchers. He also said he made revisions to the final document.

“The fact that the draft was written by a Merck employee for later discussion by all the authors does not in and of itself constitute ghostwriting,” Dr. Kirby’s e-mail message said.

Actually, Dr. Kirby, that’s pretty much a textbook definition of ghostwriting: to write for and in the name of another. And for those researchers who actually write about the results of their research themselves, believe me, they know the difference quite well. They sweat hour upon hour over minute details of their work and their words, they push panicky deadlines, and they bite their nails during peer review.

Instead, Dr. Kirby might do well to familiarize himself with another term:

Hack writer: a writer who is deemed to operate as a ‘mercenary’ or ‘pen for hire,’ expressing their client’s political opinions in pamphlets or newspaper articles; a mediocre and disdained writer

Researchers who let someone else ghostwrite their research? They don’t get to call themselves researchers anymore. Let’s call them what they are: Hacks.