How Ghost Management Happens in the Peer Review?

Lili Wang

Dalian University of Technology

1. Background----- Peer Review

• Peer review is not a new concept for now. • It is a basic method that the scientific

community made evaluations about scientific research projects and assessments of achievements in scientific research.

• The content and range of the peer review is expanding gradually, the role of it is increasingly important.

• The process of peer review is becoming more and more intricate.

1. Background---- Ghost Management

• Where did I get the knowledge of ghost management?

Sergio Sismondo

• He does research in Science & Technology Studies at intersections of philosophy and sociology of science. Most of his work has been connected to questions about realism, constructivism, and deflationism.

• Recently he has been studying the nature and distribution of pharmaceutical research, seeing this as a project in the political economy of knowledge, or in social epistemology.

• The author of An Introduction to Science and Technology Studies (2nd edition Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 

• Science Without Myth: On Constructions Reality, and Social Knowledge (SUNY, 1996)

• Co-author with physicist Boris Castel ofThe Art of Science (Broadview, 2003).

• He has edited journal issues on Practices of Modeling and Simulation (Science in Context, 1999), and Intersections of Pharmaceutical Marketing and Research (Social Studies of Science, 2004).

Sergio Sismondo

Professor B.A., M.A. (Toronto), Ph.D. (Cornell) 

2. What is Ghost Management?

• “Ghost Management: how much of the medical literature is shaped behind the scenes by the pharmaceutical industry?”

• “Ghost in the Machine: Publication Planning in the Medical Sciences”

• “Publication Ethics and the Ghost Management of Medical Publication”

• “The Ghosts of Medical Research: Promotional Marketing Haunts Studies Done on Behalf of Big Pharma's Drug Repertoire”.

• “Such articles are ’ghostly’ because signs of their actual production are largely invisible—academic authors whose names appear at the tops of ghost-managed articles give corporate research a veneer of independence and credibility. They are ’managed’ because those companies shape the eventual message conveyed by the article or by a suite of articles”

Why this ghost management happened?

• “To gain commercial value from research, articles publicizing it are written under the names of independent medical researchers, though company authors may also be recognized. The work of pharmaceutical company statisticians, reviewers from a diverse array of departments, medical writers, and the publication planners themselves is only rarely acknowledged in journal publications. Even sponsorship, the company funding of the trial, is omitted from many meeting abstracts.

• For this reason we might see publication planning as the ‘ghost management’ of medical research and publication. We apply the term ghost management when pharmaceutical companies and their agents control or shape several crucial steps in the research, writing, and publication of articles: these articles are ghostly because signs of their actual production are largely invisible, and managed because the companies shape the eventual message conveyed by the article or suite of articles.”

• “Ghost management exerts a huge force on the shape of scientific opinion on new drugs, and does so in the service of marketing”

3. How does Ghost Management happen in the peer review?

• peer review’s standard (PRS)• peer review’s objects (PRO• peer review’s committee (PRC)

There are two aspects of factors

• one comes from internal of the peer review committee

• the other comes from external of the peer review committee.

Multiple factors work together to create the conditions for ghost management in peer review.

(1) Internal factors

• Firstly, internal factors are mostly subjective.• Secondly, internal factors have conflicts of

interests.• Thirdly, internal factors include complicated

interpersonal relationship.• Finally, internal factors are also objective.

(2) External factors

• Government• Market • The Public

Peer review committee

The Public

Market

Government

4. What can be done?

• Especially in China, ghost management makes apparently the peer review becoming interests and reputation tools. This phenomenon of Ghost Management usually may display several features.

• On the one hand, ghost management is invisible.

• On the other hand, ghost management is common.

• Data show that in 2006, China research and development spending already accounts for 1.42% of the proportion of the national GDP, compared with the G8 member states, already higher than Italy and Russia, in a medium very low levels. Among them, the Chinese university research and development expenses accounts for 0.13% of the proportion of the national GDP

Thank you!