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 WileyBlackwell, 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
The
Public
Market
Peer
review
committee
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!