How much does the fossil fuel industry fund medical research?
BMJ 2024; 387 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.q2589 (Published 27 November 2024) Cite this as: BMJ 2024;387:q2589
- Hristio Boytchev, investigative reporter1,
- Natalie Widmann, freelance data journalist2,
- Simon Wörpel, freelance data journalist3
- Correspondence to: H Boytchev hboytchev{at}bmj.com
An investigation by The BMJ shows the extent of the fossil fuel industry’s involvement in medical research, leading to fresh calls for academics and publishing companies to cut ties with such companies.
Over the past six years more than 180 articles in medical publications or medical articles in other publications have acknowledged funding by the fossil fuel industry, and an additional 1000 articles have authors who worked for a fossil fuel company or related organisation, The BMJ’s analysis found.
Many studies don’t have an obvious link with fossil fuel industry interests, but experts speaking to The BMJ say that publishing research benefits the companies by enhancing their reputation and buying influence among researchers and health practitioners. Some of the papers cover topics related to environmental health effects or that might relate to workforce health issues.
David McCoy, a research lead at the United Nations University International Institute for Global Health in Malaysia, says the issue is particularly charged for doctors and public health professionals because of the health effects of the climate emergency. Collaborations with academia give industry a “social licence to continue and behave in the way that they behave,” he says.
“Fossil fuel industries are very politically active,” he adds. “They lobby governments. They have a huge amount of power in shaping energy policy and industrial policy.”
A previous investigation by The BMJ found that the fossil fuel industry has funnelled billions of dollars to academia in a decades long effort to weaken messages on climate.1 A recent review found that “universities are an established yet under-researched vehicle of climate obstruction by the fossil fuel industry.”2
Drilling deep
The BMJ asked fossil fuel companies and their associates to respond to criticism of the industry’s involvement in medical research.
Its analysis found that Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s national oil company, was involved in around 600 medical articles, mostly through Johns Hopkins Aramco Healthcare (JHAH), a joint project between the oil giant and Johns Hopkins Medicine. Many papers with JHAH involvement concerned infectious diseases such as covid-19 and mpox. Johns Hopkins University and Johns Hopkins Medicine did not respond to The BMJ’s request for a comment. Saudi Aramco declined to comment.
ExxonMobil was linked to the second largest group of articles. The ExxonMobil Foundation has funded the WorldWide Antimalarial Resistance Network, which supports malaria research. Until recently the company spent almost three decades drilling for oil in Equatorial Guinea, a country with a high risk of malaria.3
ExxonMobil did not answer The BMJ’s invitation for a comment and instead deferred to the American Petroleum Institute, which didn’t reply.
One researcher was responsible for a high number of papers linked to ExxonMobil: Edward Calabrese, professor emeritus of environmental health sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who acknowledged support from the ExxonMobil Foundation in more than 60 publications. Calabrese did not reply to The BMJ’s request for a comment.
More than 1000 articles were coauthored by employees of fossil fuel companies. Often this was due to the involvement of hospitals or research institutes that are directly related to the companies, such as Kuwait Petroleum Corporation’s Ahmadi Hospital.
Alongside the papers that included academic or medical institutions, The BMJ also found around 75 articles written by coauthors affiliated with fossil fuel companies that didn’t have academic partners. These included Shell, ExxonMobil, and the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation (involved through Ahmadi Hospital). Employees of Shell and ExxonMobil coauthored a paper on the health effects of benzene with various industry employees.4
“Shell has a strong record of supporting important academic research and our involvement is always made clear,” a company spokesperson said. “When we publish our own research in journals, this is for transparency and also to allow the peer review process to ensure quality and robustness.”
Overall, articles tied to the fossil fuel industry were cited by more than 18 000 other articles, and 29 had more than 100 citations.
Time to ban?
The BMJ’s findings come as some experts demand that the fossil fuel industry be treated in a similar way to tobacco companies. Some academic journals and institutions have issued bans on collaboration with tobacco companies, because of their negative effect on public health and also their history of manipulating research.5 Although the situation is complicated by society’s greater dependence on fossil fuels, the industry has a similar history of influencing science and sowing doubt about its effects on health.
In 2020 The BMJ made a commitment to ban advertising and research funded by companies that produce fossil fuels,6 a ban now being extended to other BMJ Group journals. “We are extending this policy to BMJ Open and BMJ Medicine and will begin a process of rolling out this policy to other BMJ Group journals,” says The BMJ’s editor in chief, Kamran Abbasi.
The BMJ has also strengthened its advertising policy by banning advertising by banks that fund fossil fuel companies. “Medical journals have an important role in not only advocating for climate action but also taking action,” adds Abbasi.
The investigation found six articles with fossil fuel industry association in BMJ journals published since 2019, of which four were published after the beginning of 2021. The papers were in BMJ Open, BMJ Open Quality, and BMJ Open Respiratory Research.
Among the five leading medical journals as ranked by the Clarivate impact factor, only The BMJ has a policy banning fossil fuel tied research from publication.
“The fossil fuel industry has a damaging role in climate change and the intersection with health,” said a spokesperson for the Lancet Group. Its editors would “strongly scrutinise any fossil fuel industry funded research,” the spokesperson said, and the “Lancet journals are very unlikely to publish such research unless it provided a clear benefit to public and human health.” A spokesperson for Nature Reviews Disease Primers said that competing interests were made available to referees and that “there is a high degree of editorial oversight for reviews published in the journal.” The New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA did not comment.
There exists a “systemic capture of academic institutions by the fossil fuel industry,” said Paul Lachapelle, professor in the department of political science at Montana State University-Bozeman, who has studied such interaction.7
“Fossil fuel companies and the tobacco industry are similar in both the vast scale of harm they cause to health and their tactics of deliberately distorting science,” said Anna Gilmore, director of the Tobacco Control Research Group at the University of Bath. “Research journals and academic institutions must rethink their collaborations with the fossil fuel industry.”
Similar calls have been made for medical organisations to divest from the fossil fuel industry.8 John Middleton, past president of the Faculty of Public Health, said that, in addition to divestment, organisations should consider restricting researching and publishing together with the industry. “I think that’s got to happen,” he said. “It does compromise the research as well as keeping us in the pay of an industry that we don’t want to be in the pay of. We are profiting from climate disaster.”
How the analysis was done
The investigation was based on analysis of Dimensions, a research database containing more than 147 million scientific “publications,” including information about authors, citations, research organisations, and funders. We filtered for articles that were published between 2019 and 2024.
Names of fossil fuel companies were extracted from the Global Oil and Gas Exit List (GOGEL).9 The list is published by Urgewald, a German environmental and human rights organisation whose goal is to establish strong environmental and social standards for the international finance industry. From GOGEL we included only companies that were categorised as “upstream,” as they “account for over 90% of annual global hydrocarbons production, over 90% of planned short term upstream expansion, and over 90% of exploration expenditures.” The analysis focused on petrochemical companies.
The extracted fossil fuel companies were heuristically matched with companies that appeared as funders or participating institutions in Dimensions and grouped via their parent company. Both steps were manually spot checked and validated.
Besides medical publications and articles on medicine, the analysis also included other articles in which a healthcare institution was involved. We counted an article as medical if its field of research category, as provided by Dimensions, was either “(42) health sciences” or “(32) biomedical and clinical sciences.” Healthcare institutions were based on the Dimensions organisation type label, under which more than 12 million institutions were labelled as “healthcare.”
The analysis included only fossil fuel companies with at least 10 publications in the period 2019 to 2024. The reported numbers were based on articles with fossil fuel company involvement and were manually verified.
Footnotes
This feature has been funded by the BMJ Investigations Unit. For details see bmj.com/investigations. The article was developed with the support of Journalismfund Europe.
Competing interests: None declared.
Commissioning and peer review: Commissioned; externally peer reviewed.