Chapter 14: MD Anderson Publications and Publication Ethics

Chapter 14: MD Anderson Publications and Publication Ethics

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Description

Dr. Goepfert has served on a number of editorial boards and is keenly interested in the educational dissemination of information critical to cancer research. In this section he talks about some of MD Anderson’s publications and also addresses some controversies with publication. He first raises the ethical issue of how authorship is assigned to a manuscript going out for publication. Today there are guidelines for assigning authorship, but twenty years ago, he explains, some department chairs at MD Anderson reviewed all manuscripts going for publication and insisted on being listed as first author of an article, whether they made any contribution to the research or not. Dr. Goepfert contrasts his own practice of putting his name on a paper only if he has contributed. Dr. Goepfert then shifts subjects and describes several MD Anderson educational publications, beginning with Cancer Bulletin, distributed free to all physicians across Texas.

Identifier

GeopfertH_02_20120828_C14

Publication Date

8-28-2012

City

Houston, Texas

Topics Covered

The Interview Subject's Story - Overview; The Administrator; Ethics; On Research and Researchers; Professional Practice; The Professional at Work; Professional Values, Ethics, Purpose; MD Anderson History; Information for Patients and the Public; Education; Beyond the Institution

Transcript

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Okay. What are some other initiatives that you undertook during your time as chair?

Helmuth Goepfert, MD:

I wanted to talk a little bit about the issue of publication ethics. One thing that is a very delicate issue is assigning authorship to manuscripts that go out for publication. There are organizations where the Chairman of the department puts down the rule that any paper that goes out of here, I have to review, and my name goes first. There are, they exist. In reality, they exist. Or my name has to be on this paper, regardless. My principle was, and always has been—and still was until I finished—that my name would only go on a paper if I particularly was involved in it, did some part of it, gave substantial input into it, or was the one that basically had created that program, but it was not a must. But on the other side, the principles of authorship, as they have been now—better defined in medical publishing—did not exist twenty years ago. It was twenty years ago the existing structure then was the Cancer Bulletin, and I don’t know if you have gone through the history of the Cancer Bulletin.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

I haven’t, no, but we will get to that.

Helmuth Goepfert, MD:

I’m the last one to talk about that. But in the Cancer Bulletin I remember there was a year that we talked about medical ethics and ethics of publication and authorship principle that never was really addressed before the ‘70s. It was sort of never brought up to the forefront in order to define it and set the tone for what was the responsible authorship.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Why do you think that issue was murky for so long?

Helmuth Goepfert, MD:

Well, many things in medicine are always murky for a while. I don’t know—I don’t know. But as I say, it was there. I wrote an editorial in the ‘90s in the journal Head and Neck—I was editor then—on the issue of ethics of publication, responsible authorship. I think that’s something that evolved during my time as head and neck surgeon here. It created a little bit of a—not friction but uncertainty when it came about. How are we going to deal with this? Who is going to decide on that? But if you set certain principles as to— Nowadays any article at the end has the lines “Principal Author,” who set the concept, who did the work, who did the final analysis, who authorized the publication. That didn’t exist then, so this is something that evolved over the last few years. Now, as far as educational publication of the institution, it is an interesting history.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Could I ask you, just before we get to that, who set the guidelines that are currently in use?

Helmuth Goepfert, MD:

I don’t know.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Okay. I was just curious.

Helmuth Goepfert, MD:

But it was sort of a movement across the country because there was an editorial in JAMA and there was certainly an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine. The New England Journal of Medicine established some strict guidelines eventually, but I cannot tell you that because I didn’t look into that. But as far as educational publications, the history in this organization is very interesting because the first president, Dr. Lee Clark, was the founder of the Cancer Bulletin. The Cancer Bulletin was a bimonthly publication. Subject varied from here to eternity. You would do well one day to invite Colleen Hubona for a cup of coffee and let her give you the whole history because she was very involved in that. Lee Clark—I mean—the historical aspect of some of these publications is wonderful. I would say the literary content of it, or the way that it was diagramed—the diagrams that he put on the front of the issue were sort of sometimes a little bit, I would say, not vulgar but questionable. For example, there was the whole issue back then of the hormonal responsiveness of breast cancer. That came about in the ‘60s. And certainly, in the ‘50s came about the hormonal responsiveness of prostate cancer. So, the issue was addressed in the form of orchiectomy. And Dr. Clark, on the cover of that issue, put an orchit. (laughs) And the title of the publication was Orchiectomy and the Treatment of Cancer. So, it’s a little bit on the vulgar side, but you must admit there was some humor in this man.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Now, how would you describe the subject matter of Cancer Bulletin, just for the sake of the recorder?

Helmuth Goepfert, MD:

It was a publication that was multi-authored by people on the faculty that would write articles for the Cancer Bulletin. If you were the editor, you had to sort of beat on these people in order for them to abide by the guidelines. Dr. Clark certainly was very good at that, and the subject varied update on breast cancer, the natural killer cells, head, and neck cancer. As I say, the publication was maybe this thick. It was soft bound.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Like a half inch or something. And the audience was—?

Helmuth Goepfert, MD:

The audience was all—every physician in Texas got it free.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Oh, I didn’t realize that.

Helmuth Goepfert, MD:

And PRS paid for it. So this was at the time of largesse, when there was still a lot of money available, so Dr. Clark basically controlled this, and even after he lost his voice he still was the editor of it, and basically the one that helped much in doing this was Dr. Hickey—Robert Hickey. And certainly, the person that carried the load for as long as I can remember—and I don’t know when Colleen Hubona came to the institution—was Colleen Hubona. Now, attached to this came other publications that members of the faculty had taken on as editors of other important journals—the Red Journal, the radiation oncology journal. There was another one that Dr. [Thomas] Haney had-Tom Haney. He had an endocrine journal. I brought in the Head and Neck journal—the one that is now being edited under Dr. [Ehab Y.] Hanna in this department here. The executive editor is Mariann Crapanzano. She works on that here.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

How long did you edit that?

Helmuth Goepfert, MD:

Head and Neck? For nine years.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

For nine years. And you edited—let’s see—’89 to ’93 you were editor of the Cancer Bulletin.

Helmuth Goepfert, MD:

The Cancer Bulletin, yeah. And I took it on because Dr. Clark couldn’t do it anymore. Dr. Hickey didn’t want to do it anymore. I took it on for a while and made sure that there was somebody that could follow, because that plus Head and Neck was getting a little bit too much. I still had my clinical duties and department Chairman duties. But, as I say, publications in the organization, there have been multiple. Now you have the conquest that is guided predominantly to get in money, then you have OncoLog, and you have all of these other publications that sort of, to some extent, duplicate at a lower scale and was much less expense than the Cancer Bulletin was.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Now, what did you see as the significance of publications like the Cancer Bulletin?

Helmuth Goepfert, MD:

It would educate people out there, and people got it free. All the physicians in the state of Texas got it, and basically, they “loved it.” (break in audio)

Helmuth Goepfert, MD:

The need for that publication as an organ of education diminished over the years because there were other sources. The stress on the faculty to write increased, and then, of course, PRS made the decision that they were not going to fund it anymore. So that’s—

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

And PRS?

Helmuth Goepfert, MD:

Physician Referral Service, which is the organization that manages the money that comes in through physician practice. So, that’s why it ended then.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

During the time that those journals were active—

Helmuth Goepfert, MD:

Now, the reason that it’s said about those journals is that the institution created a parallel to the office of—they created an office for scientific publications, and this Office of Scientific Publications would manage all these journals including the Cancer Bulletin. They would manage it for us, and Colleen set up a set of people that would be sort of work horses of this. And it was a very efficient office. It had a part-time office. This was in the Prudential Building, before it came down. It was up there on the tenth floor or something like that. Basically, that’s how we ran those journals, but it was set up on top of the Cancer Bulletin publication. So, this was the Office of Scientific Publications—or Special Publications, because Scientific Publications was the other one that helped people to edit their journals. That was Scientific Publication. This was the Office of Special Publications.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Now, I wanted to ask you what you felt the significance of these publications were for MD Anderson. You talked about the educational side for the public, but what did they do for the institution?

Helmuth Goepfert, MD:

Not really anything. No. And we sort of— During my tenure at the Cancer Bulletin, I remember us sending out a questionnaire to sort of feel the pulse of how people felt out there, that they would gain anything from this, something of value that they would like to still receive. We got-I would say, maybe a third of them said, yes, it’s valuable, a third didn’t answer, and a third was sort of mixed bag. They said, no, it’s really not—I don’t read it anymore. So, it was very often, if you are in a position of leadership at an institution, if you are not careful you tend to create something that is not going to be of benefit to anybody. I see that now, for example. I’m working right now in the Physician Network to create a program. If it doesn’t satisfy the need of the customer, it’s not going to be of any benefit.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

At what time about did you send out this questionnaire about Cancer Bulletin?

Helmuth Goepfert, MD:

That was during my tenure as an editor, so it was during those years.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Yeah, late—

Helmuth Goepfert, MD:

Late ‘80s.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Late ‘80s, so the Internet maybe was starting to—?

Helmuth Goepfert, MD:

The Internet was starting to come about, but Internet education was still an unknown word. Now it’s very known, but nobody knows how to handle it. But it was, as I say, around that time. And you can really, if you ever need to get information on Cancer Bulletin—which is a very important aspect of the past, of the history of the institution—Colleen Hubona has a wealth of information before she retires.

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Chapter 14: MD Anderson Publications and Publication Ethics

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