If, however, you want to prevent people from ever being in a position to use the “ghostwriter” excuse, then something does need to change. This is what my posted suggestions attempt to accomplish. And they do so without depending on natural distrust of research assistants. We could make the pool of research assistants too expensive. We could make the supply of qualified research assistants shrink by generating other, similar but better opportunities for them. Or we could make research assistants a visible part of the process, even if this means that some academic co-authors lack proper credentials.

Under this last scenario a researcher can’t make the “ghostwriter” excuse without admitting to another, equally heinous breach of academic norms. This might even have a chilling effect on the astroturfing/ghostwriting community, since they would have to own up to participating in the research and by extension expose whatever conflict of interests they may have. But it might also have a positive (from my point of view, not, if I understand correctly, yours) effect on the freelance research community, as many “skilled writers” who can “synthesize information” would have a much more visible way of advertising their services, which from personal experience, are in demand for a wide variety of academic fields including history.

I view the Sherwin case as a problem with conflict of interest, not ghostwriting. The ghostwriting is kind of an epiphenomenon, since it turns out to be an efficient way for certain non-academic players to inject their interests into the process. In my opinion, the research would still be questionable if you eliminated the ghostwriter, and Sherwin had a direct conflict of interest (say for example, being paid to produce a result). If you kept the ghostwriter, but eliminated the conflict of interest (for example if Sherwin paid for a ghostwriter out of grant money) you might still feel like Sherwin was a lazy scholar, but the results of the paper would not necessarily be tainted.

I understand, based on your comment, that you don’t use research assistants for reasons having to do with your style of scholarship, not a prevailing view that research assistants are incompetent boobs. I can’t really say whether, as you claim, this should be the norm for history. I have some (somewhat limited) second hand knowledge of how another historian works that leads me to disagree with you, but I can’t really discuss the particulars since I’d be injecting people into the debate that may not want to participate, and I’d end up debating a point with comically little hard data about how prevalent the use of anonymous researchers really is in the discipline, or any kind of personal experience with how the work is usually done.

I should note that your original post seems to imply that research assistants are draining the life blood from academics. Your comment seems to clarify and moderate this implication, but imagine you are a research assistant and you disagree. You don’t think you’re a vampire, but you can’t respond without referencing your personal experience working as a research assistant or the value you add to your project, and you feel a professional obligation to remain mute on the subject.

Your original post involved people who are qualified to respond, but cannot for professional reasons. That’s what I’m trying to do, argue on behalf of the ghosts.

As I said in the post, I really enjoy your blog and appreciate your response.

A couple of explanations of the thinking behind my entry, but also some questions.

The first is that I think about research assistants primarily through the lens of my own disciplinary practices and also through my evolving views of the intellectual processes involved in searching for information in a digitized world. It seems to me that the work of writing history is so intensely determined not just by reading documentary evidence taken from libraries and archives but by understanding the structure of archives through direct experience. In my own first research project, I spent a lot of time reading documents where the information I was interested in included accounts of African material culture, colonial-era retail trading, ideas about the relationship between consumerism and cultural change, the way that people used clothes and other products to communicate social identities, and so on. None of the documents I worked with were labeled as being about these subjects, even though many of them contained a lot of interesting information about these topics. I can’t imagine how I could have worked with an assistant who would have gone and found the information I was interested in without in some sense finding that information for myself, and understanding how it related to other kinds of information and to the overall structure of colonial archives.

So when I read about someone like Doris Kearns Goodwin or Stephen Ambrose, both historians, employing research assistants to do that kind of work of going into large collections of documents and historical writing and extracting from them information of interest to their employer, even before we get into their problems with plagiarism, I have a feeling that they’re not doing historical research the way that it needs to be done, that they’re entrusting to someone else the nuts-and-bolts understanding that a good work of history requires. But I don’t want to be categorical about that, because maybe (for example) the more synthesizing-level work that someone like Ambrose did is a different kind of writing and lends itself to this kind of collaboration far better. I’m just starting a project that’s intended to be a big synthesis, and I can see that it’s a different kind of engagement with documents and secondary literature. Certainly I can see a historical novelist benefitting enormously from a skilled research assistant pulling out and digesting important background information. And I did use several assistants to obtain interviews in Zimbabwe that I didn’t have time to track down during my last lengthy research trip there, and I benefitted tremendously from their deft skill and professionalism in pursuing the lines of inquiry that I laid out for them as being interesting to me. (Though on this project, I was working on more concrete historical events of various kinds, which might have made something of a difference.) So I’m trying to figure out when and where I think an individual humanistic scholar really needs to be hands-on in order to do what seems to me to be good work–and I really do think there are times like that.

The cases of Goodwin, Ambrose and others do also raise a different issue, which is the use of research assistants as a kind of alibi for plagiarism. Either many of the scholars who’ve been caught doing this sort of thing are telling some version of the truth, and the problem came from an awkward hand-off between assistants and primary authors, or they’re fudging the truth and it’s the primary author’s sloppiness and laziness that’s entirely at fault. If it’s the former, then that also suggests that using assistants in some kinds of research takes enormous professionalism and precision from everyone involved; if it’s the latter, then using the assistants as a scapegoat is ugly behavior to say the least, but one way to solve it is to insist that primary authors do their own work, to remove the fig leaf. One basic thing to do, following your own thoughts, is to insist that any humanist who uses assistants list them as co-authors, so that the assistants themselves can assume responsibility for work under their own names. That’s one of the reasons why identified plagiarists often point the finger at assistants: because they’re often semi-anonymous, and not expected to bear responsibility for error under their own names or in terms of their own professional careers.

Other disciplines are really different in many ways, and the professional skill and contributions of research assistants are critical to conducting good scholarly work in those disciplines. Most social science not only allows for but requires the skilled collaboration of a wide range of research assistants, and I applaud those collaborations, there should be as many or more of them than there are now, though with the proviso that the work of assistants needs to be visible and credited in the end product.

Now I do think that co-authoring in the sciences really has become a thing that primary researchers use to escape having to talk about the provenance of research findings and to create a sense of their productivity that’s ultimately false or at least misleading. I don’t quite follow your solutions. If we cut funding for research, doesn’t that amount to what I advocated as well, e.g., smaller research teams who are more directly accountable for their own publication and dissemination practices? If we make funding less hierarchical, won’t that do the same in effect (keeping in mind that I totally agree with you that it should be less hierarchical), e.g., make for smaller groups of people who each bear more responsibility for conducting research and disseminating it? That seems to me at any rate the same thing as saying to keep assistants but make them full authors: that’s about a more equal or flat distribution of responsibility, which will surely mean fewer people. So I’m not sure how we disagree: I’m not saying, “Let’s have more ghostwriters and assistants who are even more invisible”. I’m saying, “Have smaller groups of people assume the responsibility for authorship–and the responsibility of securing the honesty of independent results from companies and other interested parties who want to suborn scientific research to their own purposes”.

It seems to me that you agree that having invisible, uncredited pharma ghostwriters who can’t be held accountable prepare scientific papers and then handing those papers to a tenured faculty member to sign off on as primary authors is a really bad thing, not just for science but for the careers and professionalism of all the people involved along the way. Yes, that means I’d like the ghostwriters themselves to be out of a job. If they have the credentials to be scientific or medical researchers, I’d like to see them be a credited part of independent research within academic institutions. If they’re simply skilled writers or able to synthesize information, I’d rather they be involved in any number of other jobs that call out for those skills rather than preparing what are supposed to be the research findings of independent scholars on behalf of a corporate client who intends to use those findings to sell its products.