Abstract
Compiling the Publications Produced by Medical Writing
Maud Bernisson1,2
Objective
Researchers have raised concerns about scientific articles written by medical education and communication companies (MECCs) after litigations revealed that MECCs have been using unethical practices like ghostwriting.1 Little is known about the literature produced by medical writing. While previous methods to assess this literature include surveying authors about ghostwriting,2,3 this study offers a new method to collect this literature and makes it available to further explore medical writing.
Design
The method of collection of this literature used 3 different sources: (1) Web of Science, from which I collected 26,858 DOIs of articles, abstracts, and documents mentioning “medical writ*” in the acknowledgments; (2) the websites of 15 MECCs, found during the mapping of MECCs for another study, that publicize the literature they produce, and from which I collected 4555 additional DOIs; and (3) the Industry Documents Library of University of California, San Francisco (https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu), in which I found the publication trackers of 5 companies and collected 229 DOIs of publications. The final database includes the metadata of 31,642 documents published between 1972 and 2025, collected from Web of Science, cleaned in R, and analyzed with the library dplyr (version 1.1.4).
Results
Transparency practices of disclosure of medical writing differed according to data sources. Only 252 of 4784 publications (5.3%) acknowledged medical writing in the Industry Documents Library and the MECCs websites. In contrast, a timeline of the literature collected from Web of Science identified an increase in transparency practices, with 138 publications acknowledging medical writing in 2008, 1475 in 2016, and 4265 in 2024. Topics also differed according to data sources. Four of the top 10 publishing journals of the MECC literature focused on health economics and outcomes research (Value in Health, Journal of Medical Economics, Current Medical Research and Opinion, Pharmacoeconomics). These 4 journals published 348 documents written by MECCs, which represents 7.6% of the data collected from MECCs websites. In this study, journals that published the MECC-written literature covered a range of topics. Among the journals assessed, a rheumatology journal published 605 MECC-written publications from 2008 to 2024; of these, 524 (86.6%) were meeting abstracts, which represented 43.3% of the 1211 meeting abstracts in the database. Limitations of this study include the difficulty in accessing sources for collecting this literature and that medical writing is not always acknowledged in published articles.
Conclusions
This study highlights the need to further explore use and disclosure of medical writing in the health economics and outcomes research literature, as it targets decision-makers such as payers and policymakers. The database used in this study offers different routes to study medical writing in more detail.
References
1. Sismondo S. Ghost-Managed Medicine: Big Pharma’s Invisible Hands. Mattering Press; 2018.
2. Flanagin A, Carey LA, Fontanarosa PB, et al. Prevalence of articles with honorary authors and ghost authors in peer-reviewed medical journals. JAMA. 1998;280(3):222-224. doi:10.1001/jama.280.3.222
3. Moffatt B, Elliott C. Ghost marketing: pharmaceutical companies and ghostwritten journal articles. Perspect Biology Med. 2007;50(1):18-31. doi:10.1353/pbm.2007.0009
1LISIS, CNRS, INRAE, Université Gustave Eiffel, France, maud.bernisson@cnrs.fr; 2Institute for Science in Society, Radboud University, the Netherlands.
Conflict of Interest Disclosures
None reported.
Funding/Support
The author was part of the NanoBubbles project, which has received Synergy grant funding from the European Research Council, within the European Union’s H2020 programme (grant agreement 951393).
Additional Information
The database for this study, including the Web of Science identifiers, DOIs (when they exist), and sources (MECCs websites, Industry Documents Library, and Web of Science) of 31,642 documents involving medical writing, collected on January 9-13, 2025, is available at https://zenodo.org/records/15537678.