Whose shoulders is health research standing on? Determining the key actors and contents of the prevailing biomedical research agenda

Abstract

Background Conflicts of interest in biomedical research can influence research results and drive research agendas away from public health priorities. Previous agenda-setting studies share two shortfalls: they only account for direct connections between academic institutions and firms, as well as potential bias based on researchers’ personal beliefs. This paper’s goal is to determine the key actors and contents of the prevailing health and biomedical sciences (HBMS) research agenda, overcoming these shortfalls. Methods We performed a bibliometric and lexical analysis of 95,415 scientific articles published between 1999 and 2018 in the highest impact factor journals within HBMS, using the Web of Science database and the CorText platform. HBMS’s prevailing knowledge network of institutions was proxied with network maps where nodes represent affiliations and edges the most frequent co-authorships. The content of the prevailing HBMS research agenda was depicted through network maps of prevalent multi-terms found in titles, keywords, and abstracts. Results The HBMS research agendas of large private firms and leading academic institutions are intertwined. The prevailing HBMS agenda is mostly based on molecular biology (40% of the most frequent multi-terms), with an inclination towards cancer and cardiovascular research (15 and 8% of the most frequent multi-terms, respectively). Studies on pathogens and biological vectors related to recent epidemics are marginal (1% of the most frequent multi-terms). Content of the prevailing HBMS research agenda prioritizes research on pharmacological intervention over research on socio-environmental factors influencing disease onset or progression and overlooks, among others, the study of infectious diseases. Conclusions Pharmaceutical corporations contribute to set HBMS’s prevailing research agenda, which is mainly focused on a few diseases and research topics. A more balanced research agenda, together with epistemological approaches that consider socio-environmental factors associated with disease spreading, could contribute to being better prepared to prevent and treat more diverse pathologies and to improve overall health outcomes.

Academic dependency: the influence of the prevailing international biomedical research agenda on Argentina’s CONICET

“…A recent article built a proxy of the HBMS prevailing research network defined by the top 200 institutions in terms of frequency of co-publishing in top impact factor journals [14]. CONICET, which is a leading research institution in Latin America (occupying the 183 rd and 141 st position in the 2019 and 2022 Scimago rankings, respectively), was not part of this HBMS prevailing international research network of organizations.…”

“…In order to reconstruct CONICET's research agenda in HBMS, we adopted the same methodology applied in Testoni et al (2021) for building proxies of the content of HBMS prevailing research agenda [14]. Briefly, we extracted a corpus of HBMS scientific publications from the Web of Science (WoS) that included at least one CONICET author.…”

“…To assess the temporal evolution of CONICET's research agenda in line with the periodization proposed by Testoni et al (2001), we divided the corpus of publications into two regular sub-periods: 1999-2008 and 2009-2018. CONICET's publications grew 161% (from 4,523 to 11,789) in the second period under consideration [14].…”

“…We identified CONICET's position in the ranking of organizations previously determined in Testoni et al [14] to provide additional evidence of the fact that CONICET does not belong to the core of organizations that set the international HBMS research agenda. To reconstruct the CONICET's HBMS research agenda, we performed a lexical analysis of the titles, keywords, and abstracts of the retrieved corpus of CONICET's HBMS papers.…”

“…The resulting HBMS prevailing research agenda at the international level, as shown in that research, is more inclined towards molecular biology approaches and methodologies and cancer related research. Furthermore, it prioritizes investigations on pharmacological intervention over studies on the socio-environmental factors influencing disease onset or progression [14].…”