Influence of drug companies on medical literature

Such articles are "ghostly" says Dr Sismondo, "because signs of their actual production are largely invisible--academic authors whose names appear at the tops of ghost-managed articles give corporate research a veneer of independence and credibility." Drug companies hire medical education and communication companies (MECCs) to help produce and place company-funded articles in medical journals, says Dr Sismondo.

These articles are "managed," he says, because those MECCs "shape the eventual message conveyed by the article or by a suite of articles." Dr Sismondo looks at one specific example—the published medical literature on the antidepressant drug sertraline. His analysis suggests that between 18% and 40% of the literature on this drug published between 1998 and 2000 was ghost managed by a single MECC acting on behalf of the drug’s manufacturer. Ghost managed studies, says the author, “affect medical opinion, practice and ultimately, patients,” says Dr. Sismondo. “I suspect that most researchers – even those participating in the system – don’t have a good sense of the extent to which this happens.” -Public Library of Science