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Tobacco funded research: how even journals with bans find it hard to stem the tide of publications.

Tobacco companies are investing billions in pharmaceutical and medical products. These ties complicate the ongoing efforts of researchers, scientific organisations, and journals to distance themselves from the industry, find Irene van den Berg , Mathilde de Jeu , and Hristio Boytchev Research funded by the tobacco industry is still appearing in highly cited medical journals, despite attempts by some to cut ties altogether, an investigation by The Investigative Desk and The BMJ has found. Although the tobacco industry has a long history of subverting science, most of the leading medical journals don’t have policies that ban research wholly or partly funded by the industry. Even when publishers, authors, and universities are willing to restrict ties to the industry, evidence indicates that they struggle to identify funding sources, because tobacco companies have funded front groups and have diversified into pharmaceutical and health technology. “It is awkward to suddenly find yourself affiliated with a company whose sole purpose is to sell cigarettes,” says Wytse van den Bosch, a physician and researcher into pulmonary diseases at the Erasmus MC Sophia Children’s Hospital in the Netherlands. He had a research grant from the drug company Vectura when it was bought by the tobacco giant Philip Morris International in 2021. Nevertheless, his study was still published in a journal with a policy to reject research with connections to the tobacco industry. Big tobacco’s involvement in therapeutic fields has led to calls for journals to institute bans on research funded not only by tobacco companies but also by their subsidiaries. Nicholas Hopkinson, professor of respiratory medicine at Imperial College London, says that, given the industry’s “longstanding history of dishonesty,” it is “very straightforward” that researchers should cut ties to companies after they are acquired by big tobacco, as otherwise they would be “working with the tobacco …

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