{"doi":"10.1136/bmjoq-2024-003131","title":"COVID-19 advocacy bias in the\n                    <i>BMJ</i>\n                    : meta-research evaluation","abstract":"<h4>Objectives</h4>During the COVID-19 pandemic, <i>BMJ</i>, a leading journal on evidence-based medicine worldwide, published many views by advocates of specific COVID-19 policies. We aimed to evaluate the presence and potential bias of this advocacy.<h4>Design and methods</h4>Scopus was searched for items published until 13 April 2024 on 'COVID-19 OR SARS-CoV-2'. <i>BMJ</i> publication numbers and types before (2016-2019) and during (2020-2023) the pandemic were compared for a group of advocates favouring aggressive measures (leaders of both indieSAGE and the Vaccines-Plus initiative) and four control groups: leading members of the governmental SAGE, UK-based key signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) (favouring more restricted measures), highly cited UK scientists and UK scientists who published the highest number of COVID-19-related papers across science (n=16 in each group).<h4>Results</h4>122 authors published >5 COVID-19-related items each in <i>BMJ</i>: 18 were leading members/signatories of aggressive measures advocacy groups publishing 231 COVID-19-related <i>BMJ</i> documents, 53 were editors, journalists or regular columnists and 51 scientists were not identified as associated with any advocacy. Of 41 authors with >10 publications in <i>BMJ</i>, 8 were scientists advocating for aggressive measures, 7 were editors, 23 were journalists or regular columnists and only 3 were non-advocate scientists. Some aggressive measures advocates already had strong <i>BMJ</i> presence prepandemic. During pandemic years, the studied indieSAGE/Vaccines-Plus advocates outperformed in <i>BMJ</i> presence leading SAGE members by 16.0-fold, UK-based GBD advocates by 64.2-fold, the most-cited scientists by 16.0-fold and the authors who published most COVID-19 papers overall by 10.7-fold. The difference was driven mainly by short opinion pieces and analyses.<h4>Conclusions</h4><i>BMJ</i> had a strong bias in favour of authors advocating an aggressive approach to COVID-19 mitigation. Advocacy bias may influence public opinion and policy decisions and should be mitigated in future health crises in favour of open and balanced debate of different policy options.","journal":"BMJ Open Quality","year":2025,"id":5462,"datarank":0.26876392038420827,"base_score":1.791759469228055,"endowment":1.791759469228055,"self_citation_contribution":0.26876392038420827,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.26876392038420827,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":5,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.0354,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2025-03-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":18637,"name":"Taulant Muka","orcid":"0000-0003-3235-3073","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":148,"name":"John P. A. Ioannidis","orcid":"0000-0003-3118-6859","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":7204,"name":"Ioana Alina Cristea","orcid":"0000-0002-9854-7076","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":54098,"name":"Kasper P. Kepp","orcid":"0000-0002-6754-7348","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":34,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-03-01T18:20:47.508186Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}