Emory University

According to the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) and The New York Times, Dr. Charles B. Nemeroff, chairman of psychiatry at the University of Miami medical school since 2009 and Emory University before that, and Dr. Alan F. Schatzberg, the chairman of psychiatry at the Stanford University School of Medicine from 1991 until 2009 co-wrote a psychiatric textbook intended for primary care physicians — or did they?

The book, Recognition and Treatment of Psychiatric Disorders: A Psychopharmacology Handbook for Primary Care, has their names on it. But according to documents unearthed by the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington advocacy group, it was allegedly actually ghostwritten — at least in part — by a company called Scientific Therapeutics Information, Inc.

“Ghostwriting” is the practice that has been making the headlines in the past few years for pharmaceutical companies paying for professional writing companies to write supposedly unbiased peer-reviewed journal articles, which are then published under legitimate academics’ names. The academics who engage in this practice get the bonus of a journal article published in their name, along with a nice paycheck for lending their names to the effort.