That academic researcher certainly can't take public responsibility for the study.
But they're often willing to lend their name because drug company studies
are often large high quality clinical trials that get published in
great journals, and this goes on the academics resume.
The drug company meanwhile gets to bolster their papers credibility by
leading researchers to believe that an outside independent unbiased
expert was a driving force in the study.
Obviously, this is misleading if in fact the academic was only minimally involved
and is simply lending their name, and their institution's name to the paper.
It's unclear how common these types of unethical authorship
practices are in the literature.
And journals have now cracked down on this so hopefully the prevalence is decreasing.
But a study in the British Medical Journal in 2011 that
surveyed top medical journals found evidence of honorary or
guest authorship in 17.6% of papers.
And evidence of ghost authorship in 7.6% of papers.
So at least in 2011, this practice was fairly pervasive.
If you're interested in learning more about this, the medical community learned
a lot about this practice because of litigation surrounding the drug Vioxx.
Merck was being sued over the drug Vioxx,
which was to found to increase the risk of heart attacks.
Because of the court trials,
internal company documents entered the public domain.
And there's a fascinating article in JAMA from 2008,
where some researchers systematically reviewed 250 court documents
related to published clinical trial and published review papers.
What they found was pretty shocking.