The phenomenon of ghostwriting is most often observed in the celebrity sphere. Rock stars, famous chefs and actors are usually too busy or too hammered to knock out their own blockbusters. Or, like, they was never that good at righting at skool but there life storey is so up-lifting its got to be told.

And so journalists are regularly drafted in to aid the process: Rachel Cooke became rather au fait with the F-word while cooking up Gordon Ramsay’s Humble Pie, and Ben Thompson tooky a little looky at Russell Brand’s My Booky Wook.

If you think there is something of the night about ghostwriting — especially when the phantom wordsmith remains uncredited — you might be surprised to know that the same issue haunts science. Specifically, the ghostwriting of medical papers has been causing concern.

In caricature, it works like this: a drug company called Pill conducts a study on one of its drugs that finds — surprise, surprise — that it’s really rather effective. Pill then recruits a medical writer, Miss Pen, to turn its draft article into a nice scientific paper.

Then it identifies a researcher, Dr Big, to put his or her name to it, sometimes for a fee or “expenses”.

The result is a paper that looks very much like Dr Big did all the work and wrote it independently. And that makes it a good candidate for publication in a respectable medical journal, because any decent editor knows that you can’t run a paper by Pill plugging its own products.

In reality, though, Dr Big might have just read the paper, thought the conclusions looked reasonable, and agreed to sign off on it. After all, it’s a temptingly easy way to add to your publication list with the minimum of slog. Miss Pen’s inky flourishes, meanwhile, remain uncredited, further adding to the journal’s assumption that Dr Big has done everything himself. Is this acceptable?

Not according to the World Association of Medical Editors, which states: “Ghost authorship exists when someone has made substantial contributions to writing a manuscript and this role is not mentioned in the manuscript itself. WAME considers ghost authorship dishonest and unacceptable. Ghost authors generally work on behalf of companies, or agents acting for those companies, with a commercial interest in the topic, and this compounds the problem.”

It is not frowned upon for medical writers to turn jargon into something that would suit a medical journal, as long as their role is disclosed. The real problem is that ghostwritten articles can look independent when they are not; often, the main contribution to the manuscript has come from the company whose drug is under scrutiny.

Wyeth is an American company that has been accused of ghostwriting. The claim relates to its hormone replacement therapy Prempro, which has been found to raise the risk of breast cancer in some women.

Some documents disclosed in January, in response to a request from a senator investigating the extent of industry influence on healthcare, showed that Wyeth executives thought up ideas for journal articles, titled them, drafted them, identified potential Dr Bigs, brought in writers and identified journals to which they could be submitted.

Merck, still being sued over Vioxx, a painkiller that was withdrawn in 2004 after being linked to heart attacks, is also accused of ghostwriting favourable articles. One editor who unknowingly published such a paper said she “considered that being scammed”.

In fact, Merck produced its own journal, the Australasian Journal of Bone & Joint Medicine, which was published by Elsevier (it was a collection of reprints of previous studies of Merck products). Elsevier says it was hoodwinked, and has attacked the company for what happened.

Still, the “journal” contained some very interesting and informative articles, casting Merck products in a rather favourable light. Yeah, I know. Surprised me too.

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