Healthcare and Technology

The Ghosts in the Studies

By Jackson Bomongcag, YouthCare Connect 7/27/2026

When physicians write prescriptions, their decision and choice of medication is supposed to be backed by published research, peer-reviewed studies, and credible science written by reliable researchers. Publishing is a long process, where the results are printed in journals that have built up their reputations for decades. However, in today’s research environment, the process of publishing has been taken over by ghosts.

Medical ghostwriting is the practice of a pharmaceutical company writing and drafting a research paper, then “recruiting” an established researcher to sign as an author. This is usually done through hidden steps, cash, or even career perks. When documents were released from Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, and other pharmaceutical manufacturers, their campaigns of ghostwriting were exposed. These were not mistakes or lapses in judgement, but business processes that had budgets and timelines.

Why the Issue Matters

The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE)—the committee that most scientific journals follow—defines an author as someone who contributed significantly to the design, data, and analysis of a study, as well as someone who is accountable for the integrity of that result (ICMJE). In the cases of ghostwriting, the academic author did not meet even the minimal standard of having made any significant intellectual contribution to the study; rather, they spent their time editing the manuscript and attaching the academic institution to it. The people who actually wrote the manuscript were neither listed nor seen in the byline.

The distance between this practice and the now-common practice of “disclosed” medical writing is narrower than the industry likes to admit. The writer may be acknowledged in a footnote, but the academic listed as the article’s lead author may have had little input into the research or how the research was conducted. The author’s name on the article still holds considerable power in determining how others view the study and its findings. High-profile doctors and clinicians whose reputations are trusted by other doctors are often the target of research recruitment (Sismondo).

The Scale

This practice is not limited to a few prominent medical journals. Audits of scientific journals have found that honorary and ghost authorship is common in biomedically published articles, appearing in 8 to 11 percent of publications in major medical journals (Mowatt et al.). This means that a considerable number of published medical articles promoting various drugs were written by individuals whose names appear on the article and whose employer stands to gain the most from the article’s published findings. Doctors who read these articles are unaware of this practice.

Consider the promotion of the painkiller Vioxx. Numerous research studies published in scientific journals promoted the benefits of Vioxx and its lack of negative side effects. However, when Vioxx was withdrawn from sale in 2004, the U.S. FDA scientist David Graham revealed that 88,000 to 139,000 Americans suffered heart attacks while taking the drug, and many of those heart attacks were fatal (Graham et al.). Another example exists in the drug manufacturer GSK, which was exposed in litigation with another drug manufacturer to have published research articles to promote its drug Paxil, regardless of the findings of the research study (Bass).

The Flaw in the Incentives

There are pressures on both sides of the sponsorship of medical research. Medical research articles receive as much attention as advertising for the drug manufacturers; they are the drug manufacturers’ most prominent form of marketing. At the same time, academics are under intense pressure to publish research in high-impact medical journals to receive funding and teaching positions (Relman). In this environment of both pressures, it is understandable why medical researchers often accept opportunities to publish articles in scientific journals with pharmaceutical sponsorship. Nobody is a villain; both parties are acting according to accepted practices within their fields.

When Trust Becomes a Trap

Each time a doctor prescribes an antibiotic to a patient, the patient receives a prescription. That does not mean the patient is expected to read the research study that authorized the drug prescription. The patient trusts their doctor, who bases their prescribing upon their trust in the journal.

This is the reason for groups such as YouthCare Connect. While the failures of medical journals are often dramatic and readily observed in the outcome of patients’ medical treatments, the failures are more often structural and invisible. A generation of teenagers struggling with health issues, parents desperate to find the best treatment for their child, and future medical students who will have to prescribe drugs in the future do not have the tools to read, analyze, and trust the integrity of the scientific journal publications that authorize these drugs. Such teenagers, parents, and future medical students deserve to know of the existence of the corruption in the information presented to them by scientific journals.

Why the Safeguards are Failing

The countermeasures have become more sophisticated. The ICMJE’s recommendations for 2026 require authors to submit an itemized list of what each contributor to the paper did for the manuscript, and Good Publication Practice guidelines asks publishers to disclose if authors received assistance in writing the paper (ICMJE). These are improvements. They are also easily satisfied without changing a thing.

However, a paper that was ghostwritten by someone else but otherwise well written and defended by the named author will pass through these quality control checks. The existing system only prevents lies in the form of the paper, not in its substance. So long as the prestige of a research institution can be rented and a conflict of interest is hidden in an author’s affiliation with a respected scientific institution, medical research will continue to be exposed to the possibility of scientific fraud. Doctors and physicians deserve to know and trust what they are reading. Patients deserve to know that the medicine they are taking was not sold to their doctor through ghostwritten research that was never researched from the beginning.