Traditionally, personal integrity and professional accountability have guaranteed
appropriate authorship of biomedical journal articles. However, recent controversies,
including exposés of ghostwriting and guest authorship, have shown the fallibility of this
trust. Ghostwriting, the practice whereby individuals make significant contributions to writing
a manuscript but are not named as authors, invariably goes hand-in-hand with guest or
honorary authorship, whereby named authors have not contributed sufficiently to a …