Background:
“Ghostwriting occurs when someone makes substantial contributions to a manuscript without attribution or disclosure. It is considered bad publication practice in the … sciences, and some argue it is scientific misconduct. At its extreme, … ghostwriting involves … companies hiring professional writers to produce papers promoting their products but hiding those contributions and instead naming academic physicians or scientists as the authors.”
From: Gøtzsche, P.,C., Kassirer, J. P., Woolley, K. L., Wager, E., Jacobs, A., Gertel, A., & Hamilton, C. (2009). What should be done to tackle ghostwriting in the medical literature? PLoS Medicine, 6(2), e23. [PDF] [Cited by]
“Consider the problem of ghostwriting in science. Recently, a colleague and I published a paper [see below] analyzing the impacts of a peer-reviewed paper, published in 2000 [see below], that purported to be an independent, objective, and comprehensive review of the safety of the pesticide, glyphosate. The paper found no convincing evidence for toxicity, genotoxicity, carcinogenicity, or endocrine disruption. However, documents [see below] made public through legal proceedings in 2017 showed that the paper was not, in fact, independent, but had been conceptualized and largely written by Monsanto employees. We wanted to know: How much of an impact has this ghostwritten paper, which asserts the safety of glyphosate, had?
The answer is: a lot. It is cited in more than 800 academic papers and dozens of government documents and used as a source in several Wikipedia articles (upon which the large language models that inform ChatGPT rely). Many of these citations occurred after it had been revealed that the paper was ghostwritten; only a handful discuss the paper’s ethically questionable pedigree.”
From: Oreskes, N. (2025). Cleaning the scientific house: Rebuilding trust in science requires confronting the harms of ghostwriting. Science, 390(6772). [Cited by]
More sources:
*Kaurov, A. A., & Oreskes, N. (2025). The afterlife of a ghost-written paper: How corporate authorship shaped two decades of glyphosate safety discourse. Environmental Science & Policy, 171, 104160. [Cited by]
“Corporate ghost-writing is a form of scientific fraud: a paper is falsely presented as the work of people other than its actual authors. When such papers circulate, they undermine the integrity of scientific research and policy decisions based wholly or in part on that research. This paper examines the impact of a single ghost-written study, Williams, Kroes, and Munro (2000) (WKM2000), published in Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology. The paper was crafted by Monsanto to support claims of the safety of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup. Despite revelations of its ghostwritten nature in the Monsanto Papers, the paper has not been retracted and continues to be cited. Using a case study approach, we trace the impact of WKM2000 across three domains. We find that WKM2000 has exerted considerable influence over two decades, shaping public understanding, scientific discourse, and policy decisions. WKM2000 has been frequently cited on Wikipedia to support the safety of glyphosate; attempts to contextualize its ghostwritten origins have been repeatedly reversed or removed, illustrating how corporate-sponsored science infiltrates public knowledge platforms. An analysis of policy and governance documents citing WKM2000 revealed that the vast majority referenced it uncritically. In academic literature, WKM2000 is in the top 0.1 % by citation count among papers discussing glyphosate, indicating broad uptake, with minimal acknowledgment of conflict of interest. Our findings underscore the need for stricter journal policies to screen and retract ghostwritten papers, in order to safeguard science integrity, as well as public health and safety.”
*Williams, G. M., Kroes, R., & Munro, I. C. (2025). Retraction notice to “Safety evaluation and risk assessment of the herbicide roundup and its active ingredient, glyphosate, for humans” Regul. Toxicol. Pharm. 31 (2000) 117-165. Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology : RTP, 106006. [PDF] [Cited by]
“Concerns were raised regarding the authorship of this paper, validity of the research findings in the context of misrepresentation of the contributions by the authors and the study sponsor and potential conflicts of interest of the authors. I, the handling (co)Editor-in-Chief of Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, reached out to the sole surviving author Gary M. Williams and sought explanation for the various concerns which have been listed in detail below. We did not receive any response from Prof. Williams.
Hence, this article is formally retracted from the journal. This decision has been made after careful consideration of the COPE guidelines and thorough investigation into the circumstances surrounding the authorship and content of this article and in light of no response having been provided to address the findings. The retraction is based on several critical issues that are considered to undermine the academic integrity of this article and its conclusions …”
*Monsanto Papers. Wisner Baum.
“The collection of documents known as The Monsanto Papers represents one of the most significant exposures of corporate malfeasance in modern history. These internal documents, numbering in the millions of pages and obtained by Wisner Baum (formerly Baum Hedlund Aristei & Goldman) through legal discovery, reveal a systematic, decades-long campaign by the agrochemical giant to manipulate scientific research, corrupt regulatory processes, and deceive the public about the safety of its flagship herbicide, Roundup.
The Monsanto Papers tell an alarming story of ghostwriting, scientific manipulation, regulatory capture, coordinated attacks on independent scientists, and the creation of sophisticated intelligence operations targeting journalists and activists. These documents, which Monsanto fought to keep secret, provide unprecedented insight into how a powerful corporation systematically undermined scientific integrity and public health protections.”
Questions? Please let me know (engelk@grinnell.edu).
