Honors Projects

Author(s)

Elijah BodeyFollow

Abstract

Data will be collected from medical journals to assessed changes in the nature and prevalence of corporate sponsorship. The journals that will be reviewed are the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), the British Medical Journal (BMJ), and the Lancet. These journals were chosen because of their high impact on medical research representing both American and British Medical editorials. It has been shown that corporate sponsorship has been associated with bias results (Kjaergard et al 2002). Changes in the nature of corporate sponsorship would be linked to changes in economic climate and changes in the policies regarding how research is done and published. Data collected from the four journals will be used to determine several things: Significant changes in corporate sponsorship, differences between European and American editorials, and a potential association between subject and corporate sponsorship.

If temporal trends are observed from the data they will then be placed in a social context. The consequences of temporal trends have a bearing on social policy because a bias in medical research affects many large decisions, such as allocation of research funds, what medicines to use on a personal level, and what research should be done in the future. An exploration of the effects of the data gathered on social policy will be worthwhile.

Department

Chemistry

Major

Biochemistry

First Advisor

Juan Bouzat

First Advisor Department

Biological Sciences

Second Advisor

M. Neil Browne

Second Advisor Department

Economics

Publication Date

Spring 1-1-2016

Appendix.xlsx (17 kB)

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