Press Releases by Academic Medical Centers: Not So Academic?FREE

We selected the 10 highest-ranked and 10 lowest-ranked of the academic medical centers covered in U.S. News & World Report's medical school research rankings (8) that issued at least 10 releases in 2005. In addition, we identified each medical school's affiliates by using an Association of American Medical Colleges database. The Appendix Table lists the centers and their affiliated press offices. We initially intended to compare press releases by research ranking, but because we found few differences, we report findings across the entire study sample, highlighting the few differences by rank where they exist.

Press releases issued by 20 academic medical centers frequently promoted preliminary research or inherently limited human studies without providing basic details or cautions needed to judge the meaning, relevance, or validity of the science. Our findings are consistent with those of other analyses of pharmaceutical industry (12) and medical journal (13) press releases, which also revealed a tendency to overstate the importance and downplay (or ignore) the limitations of research.

Our study has several limitations. First, content analysis coding always involves subjectivity. The high level of agreement observed among coders, however, is reassuring. Second, our findings are based on 20 centers, which may raise concern about generalizability. Because only the top 52 (of 125) centers receive a U.S. News & World Report ranking, we believe that our findings represent a best-case scenario. Third, our coding scheme was not exhaustive. We focused on study details and cautions we thought were of highest priority because press releases are typically 1 page or fewer.

Most important, because we did not analyze subsequent news coverage of press-released research, we cannot directly link problems with press releases (such as lack of cautions or numbers, or exaggeration) with those in news reports. Our findings would be stronger if we had shown integration of exaggerated information from releases into news stories. Nevertheless, press releases matter: They attract journalists' attention, and although the practice is generally discouraged, many health news stories—perhaps as many as one third—seem to rely largely or solely on the press release (1). Journalists worry that such reliance will increase, given newsroom cutbacks and greater demand for online news (7). The problems that we document are very similar to those seen in analyses of medical news: no quantification of main results (14–16) and no mention of intervention side effects (14–16), conflicts of interest (16), or study limitations (1–4). We believe that academic centers contribute to poor media coverage and are forgoing an opportunity to help journalists do better.

The quickest strategy for improvement would be for centers to issue fewer releases about preliminary research, especially unpublished scientific meeting presentations, because findings often change substantially—or fail to hold up—as studies mature (17). Forty percent of meeting abstracts and 25% of abstracts that garner media attention (18) are never subsequently published as full reports in medical journals (19). Similarly, centers should limit releases about animal or laboratory research. Although such research is important, institutions should not imply clinical benefit when it does not exist (and may not for years, if ever): Two thirds of even highly cited animal studies fail to translate into successful human treatments (20).

When press releases are issued, they should include basic study facts and explicit cautions. For example, press releases should remind journalists that strong inferences cannot be drawn from uncontrolled studies, or that surrogate outcomes do not always translate into clinical outcomes. Although good press releases will probably help, quality reporting also requires good critical evaluation skills. Fortunately, journalists have opportunities to acquire these skills, through such programs as the Association of Health Care Journalists seminars; the Knight Science Journalism Medical Evidence Boot Camp at MIT; and “Medicine in the Media: The Challenge of Reporting on Medical Research,” a workshop sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Investigators can also do better. They could forgo requesting releases for studies with obvious limitations and review releases before dissemination, taking care to temper their tone (particularly their own quotes, which we often found overly enthusiastic).

By issuing fewer but better press releases, academic centers could help reduce the chance that journalists and the public are misled about the importance or implications of medical research. Centers might get less press coverage, but they would better serve their mission: to improve the health of their communities and the larger society in which they reside.