The Effect of Funding Source on Outcome Reporting Among Drug Trials

Adam Jacobs

doi:10.7326/0003-4819-154-2-201101180-00019

Letters |18 January 2011

The Effect of Funding Source on Outcome Reporting Among Drug Trials

Adam Jacobs, PhD, MSc

Article, Author, and Disclosure Information

Potential Conflicts of Interest: Dr. Jacobs is the Director of Dianthus Medical Limited, which provides publication writing services both to pharmaceutical companies and academic researchers.

TO THE EDITOR:

I read the recent article by Bourgeois and colleagues (1) and had questions about the analysis of how many trials were published within 2 years.

First, what was the rationale for choosing 2 years as the cutoff? The choice clearly affects the conclusions, as the authors' Table 3 shows that the publication rate of industry-funded studies was no longer lagging behind other categories if the outcome “ever published” is considered. In fact, if you include posting of electronic results as a form of publication, then industry-funded studies had the highest publication rate. It seems that choosing 3 years would have been possible, because that much time had elapsed after all studies before the authors' search. Large, complex, multicenter studies can easily take longer than 2 years after study completion to be published even without unreasonable delays, which I have explained in more detail elsewhere (2). Could the authors also clarify whether the 24-month cutoff was chosen prospectively or after seeing the data?

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Letters |18 January 2011

The Effect of Funding Source on Outcome Reporting Among Drug Trials

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Letters |18 January 2011

The Effect of Funding Source on Outcome Reporting Among Drug Trials

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