Do journals and corporate sponsors back certain views in topics where disagreement prevails?

The article focuses on scientific disagreement about the use of statin-related drugs in the prevention of cardiovascular events. The study forms part of an exploration of the broader principle of research polarization, foremost in medicine. The hypothesis is that statin-positive and statin-critical researchers publish in different committed central journals, and that they are financially supported by different dedicated corporate sources. Methodologically we use Web of Science (WoS) analytic tools to perform publication analysis of a time series covering 1998-2018 in three seven-year windows. For each window data is captured based on sets of known statin-positive and statin-critical articles and researchers, and their primary and secondary co-authors. Standard deviation is used as a focused normalization and visual instrument together with Spearman's correlation coefficient in order to compare frequency distributions of statin-positive and critical journal and sponsor articles.

© Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary 2020.