Concerns About Authorship and Bias in Scientific Publications

The Editorial Board of The Journal of Clinical Hypertension (JCH) has become increasingly concerned about the content and promotional nature of some of the articles submitted for review and publication. This problem has been reviewed briefly in a previous issue of JCH ¹ ; editors of other journals share our concerns.

An increasing number of submitted papers appear to have been written by science writers with only limited input from the designated senior author. In addition, there have been instances where a comparative medication or new formulation trial or studies of a specific procedure have been submitted in a format that appears to be designed almost solely to obtain FDA approval. Oftentimes data are duplicated in several publications. While in some cases, such as a major clinical outcome trial, it is important to have multiple publications for different audiences, this practice should be discouraged for straightforward comparative medication studies. Reports of some subgroup analyses are appropriate, but many of these are repetitive and contain little new information that was not included in the original paper. One recent submission was one of 6 papers reviewing the same trial that had been submitted to different journals.

Solutions to these problems are difficult. It is important for practicing physicians to know about a new formulation, if indeed it is more effective than another agent. It is important to be kept upto‐date about a new procedure if it will help to improve patient care. Repetitive and often promotional reports, however, are of little value and may not help to improve care.

A major problem relates to the ghost writing of articles. Too often, a study is finished and the researcher is too busy or not interested in writing up the results and is content to have an agency or science writer make up the first draft. Help in writing a protocol or statistical review is quite acceptable. However, when the discussion and conclusions include words such as unusually safe, remarkably effective, or a major advance and the references include almost every paper written on the subject, it is clear that the writer was not the investigator or that the author listed may not have carefully reviewed the paper.

Disclosures are becoming more common but are often useless. If a new procedure is described and the author named in the article is a major stockholder in the company that controls the patent, this should be mentioned. It is not enough to state that some help was obtained from a science writer. He or she should probably be included as an author. If a physician was paid to author or put his or her name on a paper, it should be clearly stated. If a paper is one of a series submitted to different journals, the editors of the journals should know about it.

JCH will attempt to remedy at least some of the disclosure problems with scientific papers submitted in the future by requesting the following information from authors:

• •Is the paper part of a series related to the same study or were papers reviewing similar material submitted to other journals or previously published? References should be supplied if avalable.
• •Did a science writer or agency prepare the paper? Did the person listed on the article as a lead or primary author receive an honorarium for authoring the paper?
• •Was the protocol of a comparative drug study evaluated by the author or authors before beginning the study?

A “Yes” answer to either of the first two bullet points and a “No” answer to the third will not automatically result in a rejection but will help reviewers evaluate the papers more carefully.

These basic requirements will not solve the problem but may help to reduce duplications and promotional publications. They should alert authors to the fact that when their name appears on a paper, they are responsible for its contents and conclusions.