Ghostwriting is called rife in medical journals

Six of the top medical journals published a significant number of articles in 2008 that were written by ghostwriters financed by drug companies, according to a study by editors of The Journal of the American Medical Association. Among authors of 630 articles who responded anonymously to an online questionnaire created for the study, 7.8% acknowledged contributions to their articles by people whose work should have qualified them to be named as authors on the papers but who were not listed.