Use of adjectives in abstracts when reporting results of randomized, controlled trials from industry and academia

Drugs in R&D
M Soledad CepedaMartijn J Schuemie

Abstract

Accurate representation of study findings is crucial to preserve public trust. The language used to describe results could affect perceptions of the efficacy or safety of interventions. We sought to compare the adjectives used in clinical trial reports of industry-authored and non-industry-authored research. We included studies in PubMed that were randomized trials and had an abstract. Studies were classified as "non-industry-authored" when all authors had academic or governmental affiliations, or as "industry-authored" when any of the authors had industry affiliations. Abstracts were analyzed using a part-of-speech tagger to identify adjectives. To reduce the risk of false positives, the analysis was restricted to adjectives considered relevant to "coloring" (influencing interpretation) of trial results. Differences between groups were determined using exact tests, stratifying by journal. A total of 306,007 publications met the inclusion criteria. We were able to classify 16,789 abstracts; 9,085 were industry-authored research, and 7,704 were non-industry-authored research. We found a differential use of adjectives between industry-authored and non-industry-authored reports. Adjectives such as "well tolerated" and "meaningful"...Continue Reading

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Citations

Mar 14, 2018·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·Isabelle Boutron, Philippe Ravaud
Aug 14, 2020·Brazilian Oral Research·Sheila Cavalca CortelliJosé Roberto Cortelli

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Software Mentioned

PubMed
Apache
OpenNLP
CONSORT

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