TY - JOUR T1 - Guest authorship as research misconduct: definitions and possible solutions JF - BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine JO - BMJ EBM SP - 1 LP - 4 DO - 10.1136/bmjebm-2021-111826 VL - 28 IS - 1 AU - E H Morreim AU - Jeffrey C Winer Y1 - 2023/02/01 UR - http://ebm.bmj.com/content/28/1/1.abstract N2 - To advance healthcare and promote public trust, the integrity of medical research must be a high priority.1 Guest authorship (here encompassing gift, honorary, courtesy and coercive authorship) lists as ‘authors’ people who have not made substantial contributions to the work. It can occur: as fealty to supervisors, such as department chairs, laboratory directors or grant coordinators, who become authors on articles without making substantive contributions; as a means to enhance the esteem a paper receives by adding a preeminent name to the author list; or as a means to hide the publication’s origin in industry, as when a drug/device company designs, executes and writes a study’s report—without identifying its employees as authors in the resulting journal publication—then invites prominent physician(s) to serve as lead ‘author(s).’2 3 Here, the physicians are guest authors while company employees are ghost authors.Although both guest and ghost authorship are roundly decried,3–8 previous publications have deemed them detrimental research practices that nevertheless are not quite research misconduct. Here, we focus on guest authorship, arguing that it falls squarely within the definition of ‘research misconduct.’ We then present options for academic institutions and medical journals to discourage guest authorship, thereby reinforcing integrity in medical science.Among major, peer-reviewed medical journals, guest and ghost authorship are disturbingly common. Across multiple studies, approximately one in every five articles had evidence of guest authorship and one in nine articles indicated ghost authorship.3–9 Studies of guest authorship show, for example, an average 44% across five high-impact surgery journals, and 60% of articles in one prominent general medical journal.10 Finally, a survey of Cochrane review articles showed 39% with evidence of guest authorship, 9% with ghost authors, and 2% with evidence of both.11 Whereas ghost authorship is denounced as a largely corporate phenomenon,2 12 … ER -