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Context: Currently, most systematic reviews and meta-analyses are done retrospectively with fragmented published information. This article aims to explore the growth of published systematic reviews and meta-analyses and to estimate how often they are redundant, misleading, or serving conflicted interests. Methods: Data included information from PubMed surveys and from empirical evaluations of meta-analyses. Findings: Publication of systematic reviews and meta-analyses has increased rapidly. In the period January 1, 1986, to December 4, 2015, PubMed tags 266,782 items as \"systematic reviews\" and 58,611 as \"meta-analyses.\" Annual publications between 1991 and 2014 increased 2,728% for systematic reviews and 2,635% for meta-analyses versus only 153% for all PubMed-indexed items. Currently, probably more systematic reviews of trials than new randomized trials are published annually. Most topics addressed by meta-analyses of randomized trials have overlapping, redundant meta-analyses; same-topic meta-analyses may exceed 20 sometimes. Some fields produce massive numbers of meta-analyses; for example, 185 meta-analyses of antidepressants for depression were published between 2007 and 2014. These meta-analyses are often produced either by industry employees or by authors with industry ties and results are aligned with sponsor interests. China has rapidly become the most prolific producer of English-language, PubMed-indexed meta-analyses. The most massive presence of Chinese meta-analyses is on genetic associations (63% of global production in 2014), where almost all results are misleading since they combine fragmented information from mostly abandoned era of candidate genes. Furthermore, many contracting companies working on evidence synthesis receive industry contracts to produce meta-analyses, many of which probably remain unpublished. Many other meta-analyses have serious flaws. Of the remaining, most have weak or insufficient evidence to inform decision making. Few systematic reviews and meta-analyses are both non-misleading and useful. Conclusions: The production of systematic reviews and meta-analyses has reached epidemic proportions. Possibly, the large majority of produced systematic reviews and meta-analyses are unnecessary, misleading, and/or conflicted.

We analysed a recently released corpus of climate-related tweets to examine the macro-level factors associated with public declarations of climate change scepticism. Analyses of over 2 million geo-located tweets in the U.S. showed that climate scepticism – and the aggressiveness of climate-related tweets – was greater in states with higher per capita carbon emissions. This pattern remained significant after controlling for political conservatism, GDP per capita, education, and gender, and was replicated across 126 nations from around the world. The findings are consistent with a vested interest hypothesis—misinformation around climate change is most likely to be distributed in regions where there is high fossil fuel reliance, and where the economic stakes of acknowledging climate change are high. Understanding the macro-level patterns that are implicated in climate scepticism can help inform structural interventions for those seeking a low-carbon future.

Past research suggests that the trustworthiness of a source issuing a retraction of misinformation impacts retraction effectiveness, whereas source expertise does not. However, this prior research largely used expert sources who had a vested interest in issuing the retraction, which might have reduced the impact of those expert sources. We predicted that source expertise can impact a retraction’s believability independent of trustworthiness, but that this is most likely when the source does not have a vested interest in issuing a retraction. Study 1 demonstrated that retractions from an expert source are believed more and lead to less continued belief in misinformation than retractions from an inexpert source while controlling for perceptions of trustworthiness. Additionally, Study 1 demonstrated that this only occurs when the source had no vested interest in issuing the retraction. Study 2 found similar effects using a design containing manipulations of both expertise and trustworthiness. These results suggest that source expertise can impact retraction effectiveness and that vested interest is a variable that is critical to consider when determining when this will occur.

COVID-19 remains a serious threat to public health. In the United States, 70 % of the population is considered fully vaccinated, a level too low to create “herd” immunity. Thus, vaccine hesitancy remains a current problem for public health and is an important constraint on mitigating future pandemics. This study evaluates three components of health messaging that might be targeted for counteracting hesitance, vested interests, reactance, and perceived threat. Structural equation modeling of survey data from a demographically representative and politically balanced sample of 1588 U.S. residents showed that reactance was the only significant explanation for self-reported vaccination status. Its effect was stronger for conservatives, with reactance strongly and negatively influencing vaccine acceptance as a mediating factor. The same path was significant for liberals but with a drastically smaller total effect. Liberals also had a small but significant direct effect of reactance on reported vaccination. These findings indicate that to encourage the highest possible acceptance, future vaccine policy and messaging must avoid threatening perceived individual freedoms and stress personal choice. We suggest such measures.

The concept of institutional path dependence offers useful ways of understanding the trajectories of water policy reforms and how past institutional arrangements, policy paradigms and development patterns constrain current and future choices and limit institutional adaptability. The value of this concept is demonstrated through an analysis of environmental water recovery in Australia's Murray-Darling Basin, where while significant water volumes have been reallocated to the environment, the costs have also been significant. While there are significant lessons from the Australian experience, attempts to emulate the approach involve substantive risks and may be prohibitively costly for less wealthy nations. Context-specific institutional analysis is emphasised as fundamental to water reform and critical for reform architecture and sequencing. A key finding is that while crisis can provide powerful catalysts for institutional innovation, institutional path dependence in the absence of active and disruptive policy entrepreneurs fosters a strong tendency to reinforce the status quo and limit innovation, potentially exposing social-ecological systems to greater shocks due to climate change and other sources of escalating uncertainty.

In this survey Ian McEwan emerges as one of those rare writers whose works have received both popular and critical acclaim. His novels grace the bestseller lists, and he is well regarded by critics, both as a stylist and as a serious thinker about the function and capacities of narrative fiction.McEwan’s novels treat issues that are central to our times: politics, and the promotion of vested interests; male violence and the problem of gender relations; science and the limits of rationality; nature and ecology; love and innocence; and the quest for an ethical worldview. Yet he is also an economical stylist: McEwan’s readers are called upon to attend, not just to the grand themes, but also to the precision of his spare writing.Although McEwan’s later works are more overtly political, more humane, and more ostentatiously literary than the early work, Dominic Head uncovers the continuity as well as the sense of evolution through the oeuvre. Head makes the case for McEwan’s prominence - pre-eminence, even - in the canon of contemporary British novelists.

We evaluate the extent to which Coca-Cola tried to influence research in the Global Energy Balance Network, as revealed by correspondence between the company and leading public health academics obtained through Freedom-of-Information (FOI) requests. US state FOI requests were made in the years 2015-2016 by US Right to Know, a non-profit consumer and public health group, obtaining 18 030 pages of emails covering correspondence between The Coca-Cola Company and public health academics at West Virginia University and University of Colorado, leading institutions of the Global Energy Balance Network. We performed a narrative, thematic content analysis of 18 036 pages of Coca-Cola Company's emails, coded between May and December 2016, against a taxonomy of political influence strategies. Emails identified two main strategies, regarding information and messaging and constituency building, associated with a series of practices and mechanisms that could influence public health nutrition. Despite publications claiming independence, we found evidence that Coca-Cola made significant efforts to divert attention from its role as a funding source through diversifying funding partners and, in some cases, withholding information on the funding involved. We also found documentation that Coca-Cola supported a network of academics, as an 'email family' that promoted messages associated with its public relations strategy, and sought to support those academics in advancing their careers and building their affiliated public health and medical institutions. Coca-Cola sought to obscure its relationship with researchers, minimise the public perception of its role and use these researchers to promote industry-friendly messaging. More robust approaches for managing conflicts of interest are needed to address diffuse and obscured patterns of industry influence.

Offshore wind (OSW) has the potential to cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and halt damaging climate change. However, policies to foster an OSW industry in Norway have long been small and scarce. Recent events suggest that this is changing, as the state-owned enterprise Enova decided to grant a record NOK 2.3 bn to build the world’s largest floating offshore wind farm in 2019, the Hywind Tampen project. Based on previous work by the corresponding author, we summarize the political development of OSW in Norway to distil generalisable lessons. The corresponding author employed interviews, document analysis and process tracing, using a theory of policy change to characterise the observed political change. She found that the main obstacle for early OSW deployment has been that environmental and visibility concerns have exacerbated energy–political ones that are created by a longstanding lack of local energy demands. As the green energy demand on a global scale is soaring, the lack of OSW deployment for exports implies that climate–political objectives have been subordinated to energy–political ones, in the formulation of Norwegian OSW policies. This hierarchy of goals was not deemed to have changed, despite the recent political developments in the policy area of Norwegian OSW. Hence, the Norwegian case demonstrates the role of context and national sectoral policies in deciding the pace of sustainable energy transitions. It is suggested that future research considers how policy best practices for renewable energy deployment could be adjusted across varying national contexts to overcome political hurdles to the sustainable transition.

Background There are growing concerns that the public’s trust in science is eroding, including concerns that vested interests are corrupting what we know about our food. We know the food industry funds third-party ‘front groups’ to advance its positions and profits. Here we ask whether this is the case with International Food Information Council (IFIC) and its associated Foundation, exploring its motivations and the potential for industry influence on communications around nutritional science. Method We systematically searched the University of California San Francisco’s Food Industry Documents Archive, for all documents pertaining to IFIC, which were then thematically evaluated against a science-communication influence model. Results We identified 75 documents which evidence that prominent individuals with long careers in the food industry view IFIC as designed to: 1) advance industry public relations goals; 2) amplify the messages of industry-funded research organizations; and 3) place industry approved experts before the press and media, in ways that conceal industry input. We observed that there were in some cases efforts made to conceal and dilute industry links associated with IFIC from the public’s view. Discussion Instances suggesting IFIC communicates content produced by industry, and other industry-funded organisations like ILSI, give rise to concerns about vested interests going undetected in its outputs. IFIC’s deployment to take on so-called “hard-hitting issues” for industry, summating evidence, while countering evidence that industry opposes, give rise to concerns about IFIC’s purported neutrality. IFIC’s role in coordinating and placing industry allies in online and traditional press outlets, to overcome industry’s global scientific, legislative, regulatory and public relations challenges, leads also to concerns about it thwarting effective public health and safety measures. Conclusions IFIC’s promotion of evidence for the food industry should be interpreted as marketing strategy for those funders. Effective science communication may be obfuscated by undeclared conflicts of interests.

Industries that mine, manufacture and sell asbestos or asbestos-containing products have a long tradition of promoting the use of asbestos, while placing the burden of economic and health costs on workers and society. This has been successfully done in recent years and decades in spite of the overwhelming evidence that all asbestos types are carcinogenic and cause asbestosis. In doing so, the asbestos industry has undermined the WHO campaign to reach a worldwide ban of asbestos and to eliminate asbestos-related diseases. Even worse, in recent years they succeeded in continuing asbestos mining and consuming in the range of about 1.3 million tons annually. Nowadays, production takes place predominantly in Russia, Kazakhstan and China. Chrysotile is the only asbestos type still sold and represents 95% of asbestos traded over the last century. The asbestos industry, especially its PR agency, the International Chrysotile Association, ICA, financed by asbestos mining companies in Russia, Kazakhstan and Zimbabwe and asbestos industrialists in India and Mexico, continues to be extremely active by using slogans such as chrysotile can be used safely. Another approach of the asbestos industry and of some of its insurance agencies is to broadly defeat liability claims of asbestos victims. In doing so they systematically use inappropriate science produced by their own and/or by industry-affiliated researchers. Some of the latter were also engaged in producing defense material for other industries including the tobacco industry. Frequent examples of distributing such disinformation include questioning or denying established scientific knowledge about adverse health effects of asbestos. False evidence continues to be published in scientific journals and books. The persisting strong influence of vested asbestos-related interests in workers and public health issues including regulations and compensation necessitate ongoing alertness, corrections and appropriate reactions in scientific as well as public media and policy advisory bodies.