US-based pharmaceutical manufacturer Merck & Co. regularly prepared scientific studies by itself or farmed them out to medical publishing companies, it has been reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). According to the report, the company hired research scientists to claim authorship, even if their involvement was minimal. Merck is the manufacturer of Vioxx, a drug currently involved in several lawsuits.
Researchers of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York reviewed nearly 250 documents relating to Vioxx. While some of these documents were studies published in the medical literature, others were court documents related to lawsuits involving the drug.
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. The employees hired medical publishing companies to ghostwrite the articles, 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.
The research emphasises 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. It was recommended that collaborative oversight be used to maintain ethical standards.
The journal has called on all players - authors, journals, drug companies, regulators and the scientists who assess or 'peer-review' articles for medical journals - to address the problems.
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