Good question. I did a quick google and came across Lisa Bero who seems to have done a huge amount of work on research integrity. From this popular article, it sounds like corporate funding is often problematic for the research process.
The article links to several systematic reviews her group has done, and the article ‘Industry sponsorship and research outcome’ does conclude that corporate funding leads to a bias in the published results:
Authors’ conclusions: Sponsorship of drug and device studies by the manufacturing company leads to more favorable efficacy results and conclusions than sponsorship by other sources. Our analyses suggest the existence of an industry bias that cannot be explained by standard ‘Risk of bias’ assessments.
I just read the abstract this so I’m not sure if they tried to identify if this was solely due to publication bias or if corporate-funded research also tended to have other issues (e.g. less rigorous experimental designs or other questionable research practices).
Good question. I did a quick google and came across Lisa Bero who seems to have done a huge amount of work on research integrity. From this popular article, it sounds like corporate funding is often problematic for the research process.
The article links to several systematic reviews her group has done, and the article ‘Industry sponsorship and research outcome’ does conclude that corporate funding leads to a bias in the published results:
I just read the abstract this so I’m not sure if they tried to identify if this was solely due to publication bias or if corporate-funded research also tended to have other issues (e.g. less rigorous experimental designs or other questionable research practices).