The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 280 No 7498 p460
19 April 2008

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Medical journals should require all authors to report their contributions

Medical journals should require all authors to report their specific contributions to an article submitted for publication and should consider publishing these contributions, according to an editorial published in this week’s JAMA (2008;299:1833).

The recommendation is one of several made by the editor in chief and executive deputy editor of JAMA. They also call on other journal editors to report any authors who fail to disclose financial relationships or other conflicts of interest, or who allow their name to be used for work not carried out by them, to an appropriate authority (eg, a medical school dean or department chair) or oversight body.

Another suggestion is for journals to require a statistical analysis of clinical trial data to be conducted by a statistician who is not an employee of a for-profit company.

The recommendations were prompted by two accompanying papers devoted to issues arising from US court cases brought against Merck following the withdrawal of rofecoxib for safety reasons in 2004.

The first reviews court documents and medical literature and highlights the use of ghostwriters and guest authors (ibid, p1800).The second suggests that Merck may have misrepresented the risk-benefit profile of rofecoxib in published reports (ibid, p1813).

In response, Merck said that many of the statements made in JAMA were false, misleading or lacked context.