Abstract
The potential for financial conflicts of interest (COIs) to damage the credibility of scientific research has become a significant social concern, especially in the wake of high-profile incidents involving the pharmaceutical, tobacco, fossil-fuel, and chemical industries. Scientists and policy makers have debated whether the presence of financial COIs should count as a reason for treating research with suspicion or whether research should instead be evaluated solely based on its scientific quality. This paper examines a recent proposal to develop criteria for evaluating the credibility of research without considering its source of funding. It concludes that proposals of this sort are likely to be either ineffective or impractical in many cases. Nevertheless, this does not imply that all research funded by those with an interest in the outcome must be placed under a cloud of suspicion; there are conditions under which research is at much more serious risk of being corrupted than in other cases, and attention to these conditions can guide productive responses to financial COIs.
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Notes
As the later sections of this paper emphasize, industry is not the only interest group that inappropriately influences science. While industry has received a great deal of attention (in part because of the prodigious financial resources at its disposal), government agencies, labor organizations, and citizens’ groups sometimes employ very similar strategies.
It should be noted that two of the 118 studies listed as being funded by organizations “without a major stake in the outcome” were actually supported by labor organizations, which could potentially be characterized as having an interest in finding that particular chemicals are harmful.
Some commentators might argue that if criteria focus on proxies for evidential quality rather than evidential quality itself, they should not even be placed in the category of confirmatory criteria. But this is just a semantic question of how one chooses to define the categories; the crucial issue is to clarify how each of Conrad and Becker’s ten criteria actually does or does not support study credibility.
One might argue that if following GLP guidelines ensures that the evidence reported in a study is trustworthy, then it does in fact provide important information related to a study’s credibility. This may indeed be the case, but it still provides only part of the evidence needed to evaluate a study’s credibility. A study with very trustworthy data but an inappropriate study design could not be classified as providing credible conclusions.
I thank David Resnik for helpful insights related to this paragraph.
While this paper proposes three conditions that help to determine whether financial COIs challenge study credibility, Resnik and Elliott (2013) propose five conditions. Nevertheless, the conditions in both papers are closely related. The second condition in this paper (that individuals have strong incentives to influence scientific findings) is elaborated in terms of three criteria in Resnik and Elliott (2013): whether the funders have a significant financial stake in study outcomes, whether their financial interests coincide with the goal of producing credible research, and whether the funders have a history of influencing research. The third condition in this paper (that individuals have opportunities to influence scientific findings) is elaborated in terms of two conditions in Resnik and Elliott (2013): whether it is easy to manipulate research and whether there are oversight mechanisms to prevent bias.
I thank Martin Carrier and Torsten Wilholt for very helpful insights on this issue.
While these citizens’ groups do not have as many financial resources as industry, they can partially compensate for this limitation with powerful media and communications strategies. And because they are more likely to be trusted by the public than industry, these groups can have a significant impact on public risk perceptions.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the participants and attendees at the University of Cincinnati colloquium for Socially Engaged Philosophy of Science, the SPSP pre-conference workshop on Science, Policy, and Values at the University of Toronto, and the Science Studies Program at the University of California San Diego for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. I received particularly helpful feedback from Craig Callender, Jane Maienschein, David Resnik, David Volz, and two anonymous referees at various points in the development of the paper.
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Elliott, K.C. Financial Conflicts of Interest and Criteria for Research Credibility. Erkenn 79 (Suppl 5), 917–937 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9536-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9536-2