Healthy Skepticism Library item: 18840

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Journal Article

Increased Responsibility and Transparency in an Era of Increased Visibility
PLoS Med 2010 Oct 26;
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.1000364

Abstract:

In the global information age, with more and more tools available to disseminate health information, medical journals still occupy a unique position of influence as trusted sources of information-clearly different from the vast majority of medical information produced and disseminated daily.

But along with this influence comes a unique set of responsibilities. Medical journals are expected to be impartial arbiters of the research submitted to them. However, the pressures on journals to publish papers have increased year after year as the rewards to authors, their institutions, and the funders of the work for publication increase. Aware of such external pressures, journals now rightly expect authors to consider and declare all potential sources of conflict [1]. Perhaps less well understood, or at least discussed, is that journals themselves also experience pressure-to be profitable, or at least self-sustaining in order to survive; and to maintain and even enhance the journal’s reputation within communities of authors, readers, and other journals.

In a paper published this week in PLoS Medicine the potential influence of some of these pressures on journals are examined. Andreas Lundh and colleagues [2] examined clinical trial reports in six general medical journals over two time periods. (Note: this analysis does not include PLoS Medicine as it did not launch until after the first time period.) The authors asked whether there could be any association of the publication of these papers with the journals’ finances or their calculated impact factor (not exactly the same as the impact factor released by Thomson ISI) and whether that association changed over time. The conclusion that publication of industry-supported trials is associated with a disproportionate increase in citations, and that sales of reprints from these papers are a substantial source of income for journals, is perhaps not surprising, but it is alarming.