Big Pharma And Its Research Publications

A longtime reader sent along this article from the journal Technological Forecasting and Social Change, which I'll freely admit never having spent much time with before. It's from a team of European researchers, and it's titled "Big Pharma, little science? A bibliometric perspective on Big Pharma's R&D decline". What they've done is examine the publication record for fifteen of the largest drug companies from 1995 to 2009. They start off by going into the reasons why this approach has to be done carefully, since publications from industrial labs are produced (and not produced) for a variety of different reasons. But in the end: Given all these limitations, we conclude that the analysis of publications does not in itself reflect the dynamics of Big Pharma's R&D. However, at the high level of aggregation we conduct this study (based on about 10,000 publications per year in total, with around 150 to 1500 publications per firm annually) it does raise interesting questions on R&D trends and firm strategies which then can be discussed in light of complementary quantitative evidence such as the trends revealed in studies using a variety of other metrics such as patents and, as well as statements made by firms in statutory filing and reports to investors. So what did they find? In the 350 most-represented journals, publications from the big companies made up about 4% of the total content over those years (which comes out to over 10,000 papers). But this number has been dropping sl...
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: The Scientific Literature Source Type: blogs