Unprized ghosts
In a world full of prizes, there is a clear need for yet one more. An entire category of human achievement is going unrewarded (unless you consider lavish pay to be some sort of reward).
The achievement: Best Ghostwriting for a Drug Trial.
The need for recognition — and the current, sorry anonymity of the achievement — is described in a February 3, 2007 BMJ article:
Ghost authorship of industry funded drug trials is common, say researchers
Ghost authorship, whereby someone who has made a major contribution to a scientific article as an author is not acknowledged, is a widespread practice, says a study published this week.
In the clinical trials investigated in the study, three quarters of individuals who had made significant contributions to the final paper were not listed as authors (PLoS Medicine 2007;4:e19). In most cases these were statisticians working for the company sponsoring the trial.
“Ghost authorship is a form of research misappropriation, and we believe that this practice serves commercial purposes,” said the study’s lead author, Peter G?tzsche, of the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Copenhagen.