Ethical Issues in Biomedical Publication (review)

Anne Hudson Jones and Faith McLellan, Ethical Issues in Biomedical Publication. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. 374 pp. $55.00 cloth; $22.50 paper.

Ethical Issues in Biomedical Publication offers a multitude of excellent examples of how Catch 22 operates in modern academia. It could (and perhaps should) serve as the textbook for a mandatory course on ethical professional behavior at every research university in the country. Unfortunately, however, its likely readers are those who are already well-versed in these issues, while those who could most benefit from (and who most need) exposure to its ideas and principles may not be interested in its thoughtful lessons because applying those lessons would render their lives as researchers (and as reporters of research) more difficult than they already are.

The editors are experienced in the field of academic ethics: Anne Hudson Jones is a former editor of Literature and Medicine and a professor
at the Institute for Medical Humanities, University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. Faith McLellan is vice president and editor-in-chief at the Park Ridge Center for the Study of Health, Faith and Ethics. The equally qualified contributors include past or present editors of, for example, Academic Medicine, Annals of Internal Medicine, British Medical Journal, Journal of American Medical Association and the Lancet.

Ethical Issues in Biomedical Publication is divided into three sections: The Major Ethical Issues; Responses and Remedies: Law, Policy and Education; and Commentaries and Epilogue. These subdivisions are handy for purposes of organization, but are arbitrary. Themes appear and reappear throughout the chapters and sections. Sometimes such repetition underscores core ideas, but sometimes it's simply annoying.

One of the core ideas is "Who (truly) is an author of a given work?" and is addressed by several chapter contributors. As everyone in academia knows, authorship is so central to academic careers that something as mundane as the order in which authors' names are listed on an article can provoke lifelong professional feuds. One of the many valuable services offered in Ethical Issues in Biomedical Publication is a thoughtful recommendation for how decisions should be made regarding whose names should be listed and in what order they should appear. Contributors to the volume also discuss "gift authorship" and the "imagined author."

Particularly useful is the discussion on the role of the "gift author" in cases in which questions of fraud arise. If, for example, the head of a study appears as an author on every paper generated from the study and if, later, fraud is discovered to have been committed during the data collection or reporting phases of the study, what is the gift author's culpability? Jones and McLellan also offer guidelines for listing as authors biostatisticians, programmers, and other specialists who contribute to the work. Various contributors cite journal standards and changing norms in authorship to help collaborators resolve these questions.

The subject of peer review comes under the scrutiny of many chapter contributors. Ethical Issues in Biomedical Publication examines, from many viewpoints, the biases and, often, outright fraud associated with this perennially thorny issue. Some of the examples of abuse in the system offered would raise the eyebrows of the most hardheaded careerists among us. Conflict of interest issues also come in for careful examination. Although most of the contributors offer remedies for abuses and programs to restore integrity to the system, some call for a thorough review of the fundamental concept of peer review.

The book also addresses ethical issues that have arisen in association with the emergence of electronic publishing. Chapter contributors offer thoughtful, useful guidelines for addressing actual and anticipated problems, such as how ethically to share raw data, how best to protect ownership of digital images, what new forms of information management strategies the new technologies might require, and what are the copyright issues involved in sharing information electronically.

Also discussed are issues associated with publishing material in traditional venues after the...