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Viewpoint: Why Disclosure Matters.
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Oreskes, Naomi Carlat, Daniel J. Mann, Michael E. Thacker, Paul D. Saal, Frederick S. Vom |
| Copyright Year | 2015 |
| Abstract | R revelations about researchers failing to disclose industry funding of their work have raised the question: why does disclosure matter? An obvious answer is that if a journal has a disclosure policy, then failure to disclose violates that policy. But the issue is deeper than one of obeying rules; the important question is why those rules are necessary. The answer is that even if we think of ourselves as honest, objective, and independent, scientific evidence demonstrates that our research can be influenced by the sources of our funding. A robust literature, dating to the mideighties, has documented this “funding effect.” Specifically, when funders have a particular desired outcomethat is, that tobacco smoking does not cause pancreatic cancer; that a particular chemical does not exhibit estrogenic activity; or that hydraulic fracturing for oil and gas development does not contaminate groundwaterthe studies that industry funds are more likely to find that outcome than studies not so funded. The funding effect is particularly well documented in the domain of pharmaceuticals, where industry-funded studies have been shown to be significantly more likely to find outcomes favorable to the sponsors’ productsdefined as greater efficacy or less harm for the sponsor’s productthan studies with other sources of funding. The standard tools designed to prevent bias in clinical trials, such as blinding and randomization, do not prevent this effect. Many of us are reluctant to accept this finding, because it seems to imply that our colleaguesincluding individuals we may know and respecthave been corrupted. Corruption exists, but the funding effect may more often be the result of unconscious bias. Researchers make many choices in the design, implementation, and interpretation of their work that involve expert judgment, and this opens a pathway through which unconscious bias may exert itself, both in study design and in data interpretation. In theory, such bias should be noticed in peer review; in practice, these subtleties often escape notice until results are contested post-publication by other researchers, re-examined in litigation, or detected in later reviews and meta-studies. A well-documented example of this involves the choice of controls in experimental studies of suspected endocrinedisrupting chemicals. It may seem obvious that if the doses administered in an experiment are too low or the animal model is insensitive to the effect being studied, this can produce an |
| Starting Page | 1458 |
| Ending Page | 1468 |
| Page Count | 11 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holocene/public_html/Mann/articles/articles/OreskesEtAl_EST15.pdf |
| PubMed reference number | 26070039v1 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.5b02726 |
| DOI | 10.1021/acs.est.5b02726 |
| Journal | Environmental science & technology |
| Volume Number | 49 |
| Issue Number | 13 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Subject Keyword | Choice Behavior Disclosure Document completion status - Documented Dosage Forms Pancreatic carcinoma Peer Review Published Comment Rule (guideline) Tobacco smoking behavior Unconscious Personality Factor physical hard work |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
