12 - An Ethical Dilemma in Publishing

Summary

As a newly appointed associate professor in a well-known medical school’s department of psychiatry, I was assigned by the chair of the department to a prominent research laboratory. This position required that I learn a new body of research and participate in the ongoing research programs of the laboratory as well as developing my own funded and unfunded research programs. One day, during a conference on one of the patients seen in our laboratory, the laboratory director, a very prominent psychiatrist, asked if I would be willing to review a book for a prominent medical journal. This was a very prestigious journal, and the book was on a topic that I was beginning to research, so I believed I knew the literature reasonably well. It also occurred to me that publishing this review would enhance my visibility and reputation in the psychiatric community. Based on these perceptions, I was eager to immerse myself in the process; I agreed and gratefully took the rather large volume and spent the next two weeks reading the book and articulating a rather thorough commentary on its strengths and weaknesses.

I was very pleased when, two days after I turned the review in to my laboratory director, I received his thanks and compliments for the thorough job I had done. He indicated that he would forward the review to the journal within the next few days. Nothing more was said about the matter until I came across my review while reading another article in the medical journal to which the review had been submitted. Lo and behold, there was my carefully crafted review of the book – not a word had been changed, except.... I was not the author. The laboratory director’s name appeared prominently where mine should have been.