"Upon receiving Dr. Jay Amsterdam's complaint of research misconduct, the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania convened a faculty inquiry committee to review the allegations, as required by Penn policy and federal law.
After an extensive and thorough review, the inquiry committee concluded that there was no plagiarism and no merit to the allegations of research misconduct. Drs. Evans and Gyulai satisfied all authorship criteria and the publication presented the research findings accurately. Drs. Evans and Gyulai performed the research, analyzed the results, and contributed to the paper. The Perelman School of Medicine accepted the findings of the faculty committee.
With respect to the allegations of ghostwriting, the committee also addressed whether the medical writers engaged by the study sponsor should have been acknowledged in the publication. While current Perelman School of Medicine policy and journal practice call for acknowledgment of the assistance of a medical writer, the committee concluded that guidelines in place in 2001 did not. In addition, the manuscript submitted to the journal included the institutional affiliation of the authors, but the journal removed that information from the publication. Further, it is important to note that the results of the study were negative to the sponsor's product, were so characterized in the publication, and the negative findings have been consistently cited as such in the literature.
Finally, the committee found that Dr. Amsterdam's contributions to patient recruitment and data collection did not meet with the journal's guidelines for authorship, despite Dr. Amsterdam's earlier claim that he should have been considered an author of the publication. However, along with many other investigators, the paper acknowledged him as one of the investigators in the study."
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