Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-14T05:42:27.692Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“Author TBD”: Radical Collaboration in Contemporary Biomedical Research

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Rebecca Kukla
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Ghostwriting scandals are pervasive in industry-funded biomedical research, and most responses to them have presumed that they represent a sharp transgression of the norms of scientific authorship. I argue that in fact, ghostwriting represents a continuous extension of current socially accepted authorship practices. I claim that the radically collaborative, decentralized, interdisciplinary research that forms the gold standard in medicine is in an important sense unauthored, and that this poses a serious problem in applied social epistemology. It is no easy matter to find procedural or architectural solutions that can secure epistemic trust and accountability for collaborative publishing in biomedicine.

Type
Norms of Science and Science Policy
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 79 , Issue 5 , December 2012 , pp. 845 - 858
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

†

Many thanks to audiences at Carleton University, Queen's University, Temple University, University of South Florida, Georgetown University, and the 2010 meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association in Montreal for helpful feedback on earlier versions of this paper. Discussions with Justin Biddle, Bryce Huebner, Sergio Sismondo, Torsten Wilholt, and especially Eric Winsberg had an enormous impact on the final form of the paper.

References

Brody, Howard. 2006. Hooked! Ethics, the Medical Profession, and the Pharmaceutical Industry. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.Google Scholar
Burger, Robert A., et al. 2011. “Incorporation of Bevacizumab in the Primary Treatment of Ovarian Cancer.” New England Journal of Medicine 365:2473–83.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Carson, Jeffrey L., et al. 2011. “Liberal or Restrictive Transfusion in High-Risk Patients after Hip Surgery.” New England Journal of Medicine 365:2453–62.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Douglas, Heather. 2000. “Inductive Risk and Values in Science.” Philosophy of Science 57:559–79.Google Scholar
Galison, Peter. 2003. “The Collective Author.” In Scientific Authorship: Credit and Intellectual Property in Science, ed. Galison, Peter and Biagioli, Mario, 327–55. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hardwig, John. 1991. “The Role of Trust in Knowledge.” Journal of Philosophy 88:693–708.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Healy, David, and Cattell, Dinah. 2003. “Interface between Authorship, Industry and Science in the Domain of Therapeutics.” British Journal of Psychiatry 183:22–27.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Huebner, L. Bryce, Kukla, Rebecca, and Winsberg, Eric. n.d. “Making an Author.” Unpublished manuscript, Georgetown University, University of South Florida.Google Scholar
Kahn, Jonathan. 2004. “How a Drug Becomes ‘Ethnic’: Law, Commerce, and the Production of Racial Categories in Medicine.” Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, and Ethics 1:1–46.Google Scholar
Kakkar, Ajay K., Cimminiello, Claudio, Goldhaber, Samuel Z., Parakh, Rajiv, Wang, Chen, and Bergmann, Jean-François. 2011. “Low-Molecular-Weight Heparin and Mortality in Acutely Ill Medical Patients.” New England Journal of Medicine 365:2463–72.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Moffatt, Barton, and Elliott, Carl. 2007. “Ghost Marketing: Pharmaceutical Companies and Ghostwritten Journal Articles.” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 50:18–31.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Perren, Timothy J. 2011. “A Phase 3 Trial of Bevacizumab in Ovarian Cancer.” New England Journal of Medicine 365:2484–96.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Poordad, Fred, et al. for the SPRINT-2 Investigators. 2011. “Boceprevir for Untreated Chronic HCV: A Randomized Clinical Trial.” New England Journal of Medicine 363:1195–1206.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ross, Joseph S., Hill, Kevin P., Egilman, David S., and Krumholz, Harlan M.. 2008. “Guest Authorship and Ghostwriting in Publications Related to Rofecoxib.” Journal of the American Medical Association 299:1800–1812.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rudner, Richard. 1953. “The Scientist qua Scientist Makes Value Judgments.” Philosophy of Science 20:1–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sankar, Pamela, and Kahn, Jonathan. 2005. “BiDil: Race Medicine or Race Marketing?” Health Affairs 24:w455–w463.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saul, Stephanie. 2008. “Merck Wrote Drug Studies for Doctors.” New York Times, April 16.Google Scholar
Sismondo, Sergio. 2007. “Ghost Management: How Much of the Medical Literature Is Shaped behind the Scenes by the Pharmaceutical Industry?” PLoS Medicine 4:1429–33.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sismondo, Sergio. 2009. “Ghosts in the Machine: Publication Planning in the Medical Sciences.” Social Studies of Science 29:171–97.Google Scholar
Sismondo, Sergio, and Doucet, Mathieu. 2009. “Publication Ethics and the Ghost Management of Medical Publication.” Bioethics 24:273–83.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wang, Lili, et al. 2011. “SF3B1 and Other Novel Cancer Genes in Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia.” New England Journal of Medicine 365:2497–2506.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wilholt, Torsten. 2009. “Bias and Values in Scientific Research.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 40:92–101.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Winsberg, Eric. 2012. “Values and Uncertainties in the Predictions of Global Climate Models.” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 22:111–37.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed