The Impact of Biomedical Knowledge Accumulation on Mortality: A Bibliometric Analysis of Cancer Data / Frank R. Lichtenberg.

By:

Lichtenberg, Frank R

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National Bureau of Economic Research

Material type: Text

TextSeries: Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) ; no. w19593.Publication details: Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2013.Description: 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white)Subject(s):

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Abstract: I examine the relationship across diseases between the long-run growth in the number of publications about a disease and the change in the age-adjusted mortality rate from the disease. The diseases analyzed are almost all the different forms of cancer, i.e. cancer at different sites in the body (lung, colon, breast, etc.). Time-series data on the number of publications pertaining to each cancer site were obtained from PubMed. For articles published since 1975, it is possible to distinguish between publications indicating and not indicating any research funding support.Abstract: My estimates indicate that mortality rates: (1) are unrelated to the (current or lagged) stock of publications that had not received research funding; (2) are only weakly inversely related to the contemporaneous stock of published articles that received research funding; and (3) are strongly inversely related to the stock of articles that had received research funding and been published 5 and 10 years earlier. The effect after 10 years is 66% larger than the contemporaneous effect. The strong inverse correlation between mortality growth and growth in the lagged number of publications that were supported by research funding is not driven by a small number of outliers.

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Item type	Home library	Collection	Call number	Status	Date due	Barcode	Item holds
Working Paper	Biblioteca Digital	Colección NBER	nber w19593 (Browse shelf(Opens below))	Not For Loan

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October 2013.

I examine the relationship across diseases between the long-run growth in the number of publications about a disease and the change in the age-adjusted mortality rate from the disease. The diseases analyzed are almost all the different forms of cancer, i.e. cancer at different sites in the body (lung, colon, breast, etc.). Time-series data on the number of publications pertaining to each cancer site were obtained from PubMed. For articles published since 1975, it is possible to distinguish between publications indicating and not indicating any research funding support.

My estimates indicate that mortality rates: (1) are unrelated to the (current or lagged) stock of publications that had not received research funding; (2) are only weakly inversely related to the contemporaneous stock of published articles that received research funding; and (3) are strongly inversely related to the stock of articles that had received research funding and been published 5 and 10 years earlier. The effect after 10 years is 66% larger than the contemporaneous effect. The strong inverse correlation between mortality growth and growth in the lagged number of publications that were supported by research funding is not driven by a small number of outliers.