ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE Use of Adjectives in Abstracts when Reporting Results of Randomized, Controlled Trials from Industry and Academia

The Author(s) 2015. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Objective Accurate representation of study findings is crucial to preserve public trust. The language used to de-scribe results could affect perceptions of the efficacy or safety of interventions. We sought to compare the adjec-tives used in clinical trial reports of industry-authored and non-industry-authored research. Methods We included studies in PubMed that were ran-domized trials and had an abstract. Studies were classified as ‘‘non-industry-authored’ ’ when all authors had academic or governmental affiliations, or as ‘‘industry-authored’’ when any of the authors had industry affiliations. Abstracts were analyzed using a part-of-speech tagger to identify adjectives. To reduce the risk of false positives, the ana