the harm caused by their fraudulent activity.
Third, there needs to be a standing committee, task force, or office with an established institutional home whose job is to gather information about potential cases of ghostwriting, to sanction authors who have been determined to participate in ghostwriting, and to disseminate information about ghostwritten papers to the public. One major difficulty in identifying ghostwritten articles is the fact that journal editors are often reluctant to identify suspected or known ghostwriters publicly. A committee to counter ghostwriting could be housed in a professional body or in a governmental institution, such as the Office of Research Integrity (ORI). Alternatively, it could be hosted in a university or a watchdog organization.
Finally, there needs to be an effective strategy for identifying and discouraging ghostwriting. To achieve this end, we propose an amnesty program where people who report their own involvement in the production of ghostwritten journal articles are offered immunity from sanction in exchange for a detailed description of their involvement. People involved with the production of ghostwritten articles but who have not reported their involvement, on the other hand, would, if discovered, receive sanctions. In the case of academic sham authors, for example, such sanctions might include restrictions on receiving federal funds for research and the forwarding of the academic misconduct case to the university of the researcher in question. The benefit of the amnesty approach is that it would offer incentives for authors to come forward and would identify previously ghostwritten papers, while also discouraging the production of ghostwritten papers in the future.
I would urge practicing physicians and physician-scientists to support these recommendations.
Otherwise, the continued production of ghost-written pseudoevidence will continue to undermine science and delude practitioners.