Ethical Editing – Ghostwriting is an unhealthy practice
January 16, 2014
(Editor's Note: This is an opinion piece. The views expressed below are not necessarily those of Ghost Writer, Inc. But I thought I'd run this, to give readers a good idea of the arguments against hiring a ghostwriter for academic and other related unethical purposes. In my opinion, hiring a ghostwriter to write a book, screenplay, business document or music lyrics is not an unethical practice, nor is it plagiarism.)
The term Ghostwriter is defined as a professional writer who is employed to write works for which he will receive no official credit but will instead remain anonymous. This has been a very common practice since time immemorial when secretaries and scribes used to write speeches and letters for their country’s leaders, or the pupils of a particular teacher would complete their master’s work under his direction and sometimes after his death. Even today, it is customary for presidents to give public speeches which have been written by someone else, or for ghostwriters to respond to letters written to citizens in the name of the president. They may even be contracted to write their “autobiographies”. Ghostwriting also frequently occurs in the world of journalism, in the production of comics, and some encyclicals have even been written for Popes by ghostwriters.
What is wrong with this ? Nothing. But….in the world of academic studies in general and the field of research in particular, ghostwriting is also considered to be a form of plagiarism, unethical behavior which could even go as far as to cause health problems for the population, with corresponding legal repercussions. Let’s investigate this further.
The ghostwriter is a resource frequently used by university students who must present a piece of written work to enable them to graduate, a Masters and even a post-graduate thesis, and for this they contract professional writers who do the work for them. As a result of this practice, “paper writing factories” have come into existence which levy a charge to write all kinds of academic works. These have sprung up by the dozen over the last ten years, offering their services on-line. The basic services offer previously written essays at affordable prices, but a “personalized” writing service is also offered at a higher price, which frequently ranges from US$10 to US$50 per page.
The problem is even more critical when we get into the field of academic research and that of publications which appear in peer-reviewed journals. The ghostwriter is encountered most frequently in health sciences journals, and marginally so in other research disciplines. But how frequently does ghostwriting occur or how extensive is it? To get an idea of this, we carried out some research using Google Scholar (our enquiries were carried out on 10/11/2013).
For our first enquiry we searched for the general term ghostwriting and obtained 9,570 results. As many of the results related to journalism in general or to the publishing industry, we reduced the scope of the enquiry by limiting our search query by using the terms “research” or “academic”, excluding the sub-set “-students”, only searching for items published in 2013, and excluding citations and patents. We finally obtained a result of 199 published articles, almost all of them relating to the field of biomedicine. Almost 200 articles produced in only 10 months of this year, not an insignificant number!
Ghostwriting can constitute serious unethical behavior and could also be a form of plagiarism
It may come as a surprise that ghostwriting can be thought of as a form of plagiarism, but this is how it is defined in dictionaries. People and institutions also have the same opinion when referring to the matter.
For example, The Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy (Diccionario de la Real Academia Española – DRAE) gives as the first meaning of “plagiar”
plagiar
(From the Latin “plagiare”)
1 tr. To copy in their entirety, the works of others, passing them off as one’s own.
Likewise, in English, The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines plagiarism as
to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own to use (another’s production) without crediting the source
Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) considers that ghostwriting could in some cases be treated as a case of plagiarism. This viewpoint is expressed at least twice in a report produced by the US Senate and commented upon later in this document, and again in an article which appeared recently in the journal Bioethics. Lastly, in a work published on the iThenticate blog, a company which specializes in offering plagiarism detection services, it states that
Based on these definitions, the concept of ghostwriting at its base level is plagiarism. After all, the whole point of ghostwriting is to hide credit from the real author and instead recognize another source. However, there are several factors based on different methods of ghostwriting that make the subject not black and white. (2011)
In other words, the ghostwriter can be both acceptable and unacceptable.
