Biomedical funding decisions should be audited

EDITOR—Grant et al note that organisations that fund biomedical research assume that the research they support will lead to an eventual improvement in health.1 Because clinical guidelines represent one of the final links between basic research and actions to improve health, they looked at which studies were cited in guidelines.

Although their analysis is a valuable move away from the naive use and abuse of citation counts and impact factors, they may have attempted to bridge too great a distance in assessing which publications in the serial peer reviewed literature were cited in guidelines. Guidelines …