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Many graduate students and postdocs write or help compose peer reviews their advisors are invited to provide, according to a survey of nearly 500 early-career researchers published last week (October 31) in eLife. And often they do so without disclosing that fact to the journal—a practice that the survey authors consider to be ghostwriting.
“I think ghostwriting [of peer reviews] is one of the worst kept secrets in academia,” says coauthor Rebeccah Lijek, a molecular biologist at Mount Holyoke College in western Massachusetts. “Everybody in the biomedical sciences knows about it.”
The Scientist spoke with Lijek about ghostwriting and the practice of “coreview”—participation of researchers besides the invited reviewer—more broadly.
TS: Did you do any ghostwriting as a graduate student or postdoc?
Lijek: I think this a totally reasonable question that I have been getting a lot, as have the other coauthors, and I just want ...
