A portrait of commissioned literature: connecting the dots between medical education and communication companies, authors, funders and publishers

Abstract Background Medical education and communication companies (MECCs) are key actors in the production of commissioned publications. Analyzing publications that acknowledge medical writing offers a broad overview of their role, which is scarce in the literature. The reason is that activities related to industry-funded research are highly opaque, which makes access to this information particularly hard, and related analyses scarce. This article offers a novel approach to collecting, and thus, analyzing data. It maps how MECCs, funders, authors, and publishers organize to produce this literature and identifies risks of research integrity breaches. Methods The database contains the metadata of 29 911 commissioned papers collected from Web of Science (WoS). All articles involving medical writing were collected if they mentioned “medical writing” in WoS, if they were published by MECCs websites, and if they were listed in publication trackers (documents that list the publications of companies, found on the Industry Documents Library (IDL)). The metadata were collected semi-automatically (manually and with R). Reference lists were built to extract MECCs from acknowledgments and harmonize organizations’ names. The analysis maps the relationships among MECCs, authors, funders, and publishers and shows how they connect. Results In contrast with pharmaceutical companies and research institutes, only 33.6% of MECCs are listed in the bylines and even less (18%) are acknowledged in the publications found on their websites and on the Industry Documents Library. Even though they provide writing, MECCs are usually not considered as authors. Medical writing is a flourishing business and MECCs are key actors. Only a few sponsors (5.5%) outsource medical writing to many MECCs, and a few MECCs (7.7%) have a high number of clients. The medical writing market is thus very competitive and can benefit sponsors. MECCs sometimes publish in journals that are owned by their parent or sister companies. The business model of the publishers largely benefits from medical writing by publishing their product, and sometimes providing it as a service. Conclusions The database presented in this article offers new routes to explore the key role of MECCs in industry-funded research and to further assess the commissioned literature and its impacts on biomedical science and research integrity.