Saturday, January 13, 2007

Funding bias affects all fields

We've known for a while that the results of pharmaceutical trials are influenced by the source of funding. Now two separate studies have been published showing that the same is true in the fields of nutrition and technology. I suppose it's unsurprising. The results you get out of research depend on the questions you ask. And the questions you ask depend on why you're asking them. I think all we can do is make the sources of funding as explicit as possible, and do regular comparisons along the lines of the studies linked to here in order to be able to correct for any bias that results.

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