Guest authors are frequent in junior doctors’ dissertations

On the COPE blog I just put up a short post on how, even early in their medical careers when preparing dissertations, junior doctors seem to be accepting guest authors as the norm. A poll of junior doctors, published in Swedish, with an English summary, makes worrying reading and reinforces the need for institutions to have firm authorship policies and to provide leadership and guidance in this area. For example, a recent paper in PLoS Medicine has shown that only 13 of 50 (26%) academic medical centres in the US publicly prohibit their faculty from participating in ghost-writing.