For the past week, I had been meaning to spotlight an interesting article from the 19 August 2009 edition of The New York Times about medical journal articles that are written by ghostwriters working for pharmaceutical companies. Today, as I sat down to find the article online, I was reminded of a not uncommon problem with article titles in newspapers: the title itself may not be stable. While the print edition and the online editions at Factiva, LexisNexis Academic, and New York State Newspapers all the Natasha Singer article as “Ghosts in the Journals,” the free version of the article on The New York Times web site has the article titled, “Senator Moves to Stop Medical Ghostwriting.” The date of that web version is also different by one day; instead of a August 19 dateline, it has one of August 18. It will be interesting to see which version of the article is the one that ends up in the Proquest Historical Newspapers database in a few years.
News and tips by and for staff providing reference services at the Newman Library, Baruch College (New York, NY).
