(April 15, 2008 - Insidermedicine) The makers of Vioxx, a drug currently embroiled in several lawsuits, regularly prepared scientific studies themselves or farmed them out to medical publishing companies and then hired research scientists to claim authorship, even if their involvement was minimal, according to research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Here are some facts about authoring medical research:

•    When a person or organization is involved in preparing the manuscript of a scientific study but is not acknowledged as an author, this is known as ghostwriting.

•    When a researcher serves as an author of a scientific study despite having little or no involvement in collecting the data or putting together the manuscript, this is known as guest authorship.

•    Ghostwriting and guest authorship are of concern in medical publishing because it can make it appear as though research is independent, when in fact the manufacturer may have played a major role in data collection and presentation.

Researchers out of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York reviewed about 250 documents relating to Vioxx, which was manufactured by Merck & Co. Some of these documents were studies published in the medical literature, while others were court documents related to lawsuits involving Vioxx, which has cardiovascular risks that were not initially disclosed by the manufacturer.

The investigators found that Merck employees frequently prepared manuscripts describing scientific research on Vioxx themselves and then recruited academically-affiliated research scientists to act as guest authors. Scientific papers that reviewed the data available to date on Vioxx were often planned by Merck marketing employees, who hired medical publishing companies to ghostwrite them, hired academically-affiliated researchers to guest author them, and dealt with the medical journals in which they were published. The scientists who acted as guest authors were paid for the service, but this was not always disclosed in the study.

Today's research highlights the need for more ethical practices in the publishing of medical research. The authors recommend that academic researchers provide medical journals with information on everyone involved in preparing scientific manuscripts and that they fully disclose their relationship with drug manufacturers. They also recommend that collaborative oversight be used to maintain ethical standards.

For Insidermedicine in Depth, I'm Dr. Susan Sharma.