Doctors versus “Big Pharma”: is it justifiable to judge research by its authors?

By Ilana Yurkiewicz | October 27, 2012

 

Doctors use different standards to judge scientific research depending on who funded it. They judge research funded by industry as less rigorous, have less confidence in the results, and are less likely to prescribe new drugs than when the funding source is either the NIH or unknown – even when the apparent quality of the research is the same.

 

Those were the results of a study published by Harvard researchers Dr. Aaron Kesselheim and colleagues in the New England Journal of Medicine last month. The story has received a fair amount of coverage since then, including being analyzed by the Scientific American Guest Blog, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times.

There’s a question of ethical and practical relevance embedded in this: is it justifiable to judge a paper by its author or funding source – even when you cannot discern a difference in quality?

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