A quick update to explain our most recent editorial [pdf] on evidence-based medicine published in the Journal of Comparative Effectiveness Research. It’s free for anyone to access.
What do we know?
Industry funded research does not always lead to biases that are detrimental to the quality of clinical evidence, and biased research may come about for many reasons other than financial conflicts of interest. But there are clear and strong systemic differences in the research produced by people who have strong financial ties to pharmaceutical companies and other groups. These differences have in the past been connected to problems like massive opportunity costs (ineffective drugs) and widespread harm (unsafe drugs).
[Spoiler alert]
What do we think?
Our simple answer is no, we don’t think that industry-funded research should be excluded from comparative effectiveness research. To put it very simply, around half of the completed trials undertaken each year are funded by the industry, and despite the overwhelming number of published trials we see, we still don’t have anywhere near enough of them to properly answer all the questions that doctors and patients have when trying to make decisions together.
Instead, we think improvements in transparency and access to patient-level data, the surveillance of risks of bias, and new methods for combining evidence and data from all available sources at once are much better alternatives. You can read more about all of these in the editorial.
Bonus:
Also, check out the new article from our group on automated citation snowballing published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research. It forms the basis of a recursive search and retrieval method that finds peer-reviewed articles online, downloads them, extracts the reference lists, and follows those links to find and retrieve articles recursively. It is particularly interesting because it can automatically construct citation networks back from a single paper.
adam g. dunn 