Does Pfizer pay people to ghostwrite studies?
We have strict policies against ghostwriting articles on behalf of physicians. Ghostwriting is defined as undisclosed assistance in writing an article, as described in ICMJE guidelines (International Conference of Medical Journal Editors). We follow those guidelines. In some cases, peer-review journals have additional guidelines which we follow as well. It is important to note that Pfizer currently has policies in place to ensure that all editorial and financial support for a manuscript is disclosed. We do not compensate clinical trial investigators for writing and submitting primary articles about Pfizer clinical trials to peer-reviewed journals. In some cases we will compensate a technical medical writer to work under the direction of a clinical trial investigator and the technical writers’ contributions are publicly disclosed in the acknowledgements section of the article. If a writer meets the threshold for authorship, they are then added as an author.
