Extra scrutiny for industry funded trials

doi:10.1136/bmj.331.7529.1350

BMJ 2005;331:1350-1351 (10 December), doi:10.1136/bmj.331.7529.1350

Editorial

Extra scrutiny for industry funded trials

JAMA's demand for an additional hurdle is unfair—and absurd

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Suppose that a biomedical journal invoked a new policy requiringthat all authors based in western Europe or North America wouldreceive ordinary peer review, but authors from other countrieswould receive a peer review with additional hurdles. This policymay seem unfair, but suppose the journal claimed that researchhas shown that there is a greater prevalence of fraud, bias,and sloppy work among papers coming from these other countries.

If these events actually transpired, we hope that other biomedicaljournals would rapidly point out that adopting such a policywould be unfair to authors from non-western countries, evenif the premises for it were valid. Indeed, we hope that othereditors would decide that it would be unethical to create anyhierarchical system for submissions of papers to a biomedicaljournal. Peer review ought to rest on the content of a submissionrather than solely on the . . . [Full text of this article]

Kenneth J Rothman, vice president, epidemiology research

RTI Health Solutions, RTI International, 200 Park Offices Drive, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709, USA

Stephen Evans, professor of pharmacoepidemiology

(stephen.evans@lshtm.ac.uk)
Medical Statistics Unit, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London WC1 7HT

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Rapid Responses:

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New JAMA rules make sense: Jan P Vandenbroucke
bmj.com, 10 Dec 2005 [Full text]
That which hurts, instructs!: BM Hegde
bmj.com, 10 Dec 2005 [Full text]
Imaginative solutions?: John B Carlin
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