BMJ  2004;328:48 (3 January), doi:10.1136/bmj.328.7430.48-a

Letter

Academic medicine: time for reinvention

Research needs researching

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR—We agree with Bell that advocating funding for clinical research needs to become evidence based.¹

With colleagues we recently explored the relations between basic research, clinical research, and clinical practice.^{2 3} In the first report we tried to replicate Comroe and Dripps's seminal study as reported in Science in 1976,⁴ tracing back from current clinical practice to the knowledge behind the advance.² Comroe and Dripps concluded that 40% of all research articles judged to be essential for later clinical advance were not clinically oriented at the time of the study and that 62% of key articles reported basic research. Their paper has often been used (albeit at times implicitly) in support of the increased funding for basic biomedical research in the United Kingdom and elsewhere over the past two decades.

We found we were unable to repeat the study method, thus confirming earlier doubts about it⁵ and raising questions . . . [Full text of this article]

RAND Europe, Grafton House, Cambridge CB5 8DD jgrant@rand.org

Health Economics Research Group (HERG), Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex UB8 3PH

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