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You might recall a big medical news – the painkiller Vioxx, a drug used by about 20 million Americans at the time, was pulled from shelves by its manufacturer after it became clear that it posed a higher risk of heart attacks and strokes than previously reported. The manufacturer, Merck, now faces more than 10,000 lawsuits over the drug. But as today’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required) reports, far less attention has been paid to the role that the oft-cited and highly respected New England Journal of Medicine played in the matter:

“While Merck has taken the brunt of criticism in the affair, the New England Journal's role in the Vioxx debacle has received little attention. The journal is the most-cited medical publication in the world, and its November 2000 article on Vioxx was a major marketing tool for Merck.

Last December, the journal repudiated the Vioxx article in an ‘expression of concern,’ but only after the drug had been recalled and more than five years after the article appeared. Had the journal acted before the recall, its authoritative voice almost certainly would have damped the Vioxx boom.”

The Journal takes an exhaustive look at NEJM’s missteps as well as the broader implications of such practices among medical journals in general. One doctor told the Journal that while NEJM should be praised for eventually issuing doubts about the article, they should have corrected it far sooner: “Had it acted earlier, he says, sales of Vioxx, ‘would have been killed.’”

We’ve touched on this issue before, since medical reporting relies heavily on the content of journals like NEJM, and the potential that the data within them is misleading means reporting on it will require a lot more skepticism.

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You’ve surely read or heard many a news report that begins like this: “An article in The New England Journal of Medicine today revealed … .” And then of course you learn that the Red dye #40 in that candy you love so much is probably going to kill you. Indeed, scientific journals provide a constant stream of story topics for science and medical reporters, which is why recent revelations that South Korean scientist Dr. Hwang Woo Suk falsified data in research published in the journal Science has yielded strong reactions not just in the scientific community, but closer considerations of how such reports are used by the journalists who rely on them.

In The New York Times today, Julie Bosman examines how print reporters are approaching the articles in scientific journals following the revelations that Hwang falsified data that showed he had created stem cells from a cloned human embryo. For the most part, Bosman finds, the scandal has not led to less reliance upon such journal articles, but more skepticism in reporting on them, which in itself offers a conundrum for reporters. Rob Stein, a science reporter for the Washington Post, told Bosman: “ ‘… we're still in sort of the same situation that the journal editors are, which is that if someone wants to completely fabricate data, it's hard to figure that out.”

Correspondent Elizabeth Kaledin, who covers medical issues for CBS News, told me in an e-mail that, like most medical and science reporters, her reporting relies “heavily” on research from scientific journals. “Most big, breaking discoveries and studies are first published in the journals precisely because it gives them a certain level of professional credibility,” she said. When producing stories on information from journal articles, which are generally provided to reporters in advance of their publication, Kaledin says that she goes to “big names in the field who can put the article in perspective and tell us … is this really a big deal? Is this really news? What do the results mean? And perhaps most important, do you think this is a well-designed study? Are the results credible and statistically significant enough to warrant reporting?”

Following the revelations about Hwang’s work, she said that she would “definitely read journal articles with more skepticism and will ask many, many more questions from impartial observers about the integrity of the research.” The problem for reporters, as Bosman notes, is that “there are limits to the vetting that science reporters, who are generally not scientists themselves, can do.”

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