Funding sources and breast cancer research frame.

Wonkwang Jo,Amira M Idrees

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0238026

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the formation of the frame of breast cancer research. To test our hypothesis that the research frame depends on the funding sources, we collected the abstracts of 48,448 breast cancer research papers from PubMed and applied structural topic modeling, word network analysis, and LASSO logistic regression to the data. In particular, we analyzed the relationship between funding sources and the molecularization of breast cancer knowledge. The results show that government-funded research is likely to have molecular objects or population as the unit of interest, whereas the research not funded by the government is likely to have individual patients as the unit of interest in relation to specific treatments. This phenomenon is attributed to the different interests of government institutions and the private sector. This study improves our understanding of molecularization and medical knowledge production.

Highlights

The object of this study is to analyze the relationship between funding sources and the framing of breast cancer research
The specific search criteria are as follows: (1) The paper has an abstract, (2) The paper is from a journal published in the United States, (3) The date of publishing is between 1975 and 2016, (4) The funding sources are either the US government agencies or are not indicated (This criterion excludes those studies that were funded by non-US government agencies), (5) The title of the paper contains the term “breast cancer,” and (6) The Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) Major Topic of the paper is “breast neoplasms.”
The words indicating treatment methods, the words related to surgery, and the words related to patient condition and prognosis are examples. These results suggest that molecular objects are important in the research frame of government-funded studies, whereas patients and patient-related objects are important in the research frame of studies in the private sector

Summary

Introduction

The object of this study is to analyze the relationship between funding sources and the framing of breast cancer research. Various social variables that affect medical research have been studied before. The effect of the funding source is one of the most reviewed, as funding is the social variable that most directly affects the medical research process. Previous studies that explored the relationship between funding sources and scientific research have focused mainly on the research results. Few works have examined whether the funding source is related to the research frame itself. The relative neglect of the relationship between funding sources and the research frame is problematic because the research frame determines which topics are studied in the first place

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Conclusion