Campus News

Essay: Drug companies found to influence writing in medical journals

Drug companies may have a more influential role in how professors publish articles in medical journals, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported.

In an essay published in PLoS Medicine, Sergio Sismondo, an associate professor at Queen’s University in Canada, said that pharmaceutical corporations hire media companies to write favorable articles for their products. After these articles are written, academic scientists are recruited to claim authorship. These ghost-sponsored essays hurt medical research, said Sismondo, and prevention methods, like professors demonstrating what part they had in writing and preparing medical articles, should be implemented.