Medical Journals and Pharmaceutical Companies: Uneasy Bedfellows
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1126057/
Richard Smith, Editor-in-Chief for the British Medical Journal for over a decade, said: “Many medical journals have a substantial income from pharmaceutical companies from the purchasing of advertising and reprints and the sponsoring of supplements… In one sense, all journals are bought—or at least cleverly used—by the pharmaceutical industry. The industry dominates health care, and most doctors have been wined and dined by it. It’s not surprising, therefore, that medical journals too should be heavily influenced by industry.”

Half of Published Research Likely to Be Completely False Due, In Part, to Conflicts of Interest
https://healthimpactnews.com/2015/how-conflicts-of-interest-have-corrupted-the-cdc/
“…Dr. Richard Horton, the current editor-in-chief of the Lancet… recently published a statement declaring that a lot of published research is in fact unreliable at best, if not completely false. ‘The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness…”

“Dr. Marcia Angell… makes her view of the subject quite plain: ‘It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.’”

The Highly Profitable But Unethical Business of Publishing Medical Research
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1557876/
“The model currently advocated is that authors pay for peer review and the posting of their article only if it is accepted. This seems to me to create an uncomfortable conflict of interest. Editors and publishers will be rewarded financially for accepting material.”

Research Reprints Are Huge Revenue Generators
British cardiologist Dr. Aseem Malhotra said: “Many of these journals will receive sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars or pounds from drug companies when they publish their research to get reprints from the journal that they can then distribute amongst their drug reps to doctors. So this is basically part of their marketing materials. So there’s a huge financial conflict of interest.” (Source – 23:03)

Questions Raised Over Medical Journals’ Financial Ties to Industry
https://www.nature.com/articles/news.2010.564

Written Evidence From Dr. Peter Wilmshurst to UK Parliamentary Science and Technology Research Integrity Committee
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9557939/
“In evidence submitted to the UK parliamentary science and technology review into research integrity committee in 2017 (Chaired by Sir Norman Lamb), Dr Peter Wilmshurst lists a number of risk factors that drive research misconduct in British institutions.”

Some of what Dr. Peter Wilmshurst said:

“Academic institutions bear responsibility for the pressure to publish for career advancement that can result in research misconduct.

A record of prominent publication is likely to attract future funding, which institutions demand, and good publicity, which institutions desire.

Other pressures for misconduct come from the association of academic institution with industry, such as when investigators or their institutions hold patents or shares, or they receive payments from industry, so that there is financial pressure to publish research that will be profitable for the company and to suppress ‘negative’ findings.

Some publications are simply organised criminal activities, which may be at the behest of sponsors, when prominent academics are paid large sums of money to publish false data by industry, or a sponsor may be one of the victims, when payments for conducting research are made to ‘investigators’, who simply fabricate data.

Medical journals have financial pressures to publish positive findings of research on drugs and medical devices, because their manufacturers buy reprints of the papers for distribution to doctors and they pay for advertisements linked to articles favourable to their product.

Academic institutions and journals depend on the public belief in the integrity of science, so they are unwilling to admit the seriousness and frequency of research misconduct.

To protect their reputations academic institutions conceal research misconduct, destroy evidence and silence whistle-blowers.

Journals are reluctant to admit that they published flawed research, so they commonly refuse to publish failures to replicate.

Fear of a libel action contributes to the failure to expose research misconduct.

Investigation of research misconduct may be difficult because there may be international collaboration between investigators, many of whom do not see the full data, and the resulting publications may be in journals that are published in countries where none of the investigators work.”