I’m pleased to announce that we’ve added to the Drug Industry Document Archive (http://dida.library.ucsf.edu) 241 documents about the marketing of Seroquel from the files of AstraZeneca. These documents show how the company obscured the potential for patient weight gain and diabetes from physicians and regulatory bodies and how they balanced the desire for sales with the need for scientific rigor. You can find these documents by entering “ddu:2010*” without the quotation marks in the query box.
As usual, the value of these documents is found by examining the corpus as a whole. I have, however, chosen a few documents that illustrate to me, a non-scientist, how a company deviates from what I understand as standard scientific methods. Thank you to Kris Hundley of the St. Petersburg Times and Ed Blizzard of Blizzard, McCarthy and Nabers for facilitating the addition of these documents to DIDA.
We’d like to add thousands more pharma documents to DIDA to increase the amount of data about practices that degrade the way drugs are prescribed publically available. One of our major obstacles is that documents sometimes do not come with certain necessary pieces of indexing information (metadata) such as date, title, author and document type. Creating this metadata is costly because it must be done manually.
We’d like to try a crowd sourcing solution to this problem, drawing upon the labor of many people to do the work. We’re hoping to create a password-protected, web-based mechanism that people could log into. They’d read/skim a document and enter specified information into a form. We’d make sure the entries are accurate and once a critical mass of documents was indexed we’d add them to DIDA.
We’re thinking that the following groups of people might sign on to help:
1. students in classes in medical anthropology, sociology, history of medicine, public policy, etc., as part of a class assignment or for extra credit
2. journalists who want to view documents before they are “public”
3. members of the public who want to contribute to something important, possibly retirees
We have to find funding for programming this software and we have to recruit a “crowd” to do the indexing. If you have any thoughts about how we can make this happen, please email me. I’m particularly interested in hearing from professors about whether this seems like a feasible task for students.
Enjoy reading the documents. Well, “enjoy” probably isn’t the right word, but you know what I mean.
--Kim
Kim Klausner
Industry Documents Digital Libraries Manager
University of California, San Francisco
530 Parnassus Avenue, Room 115
San Francisco, CA 94143-0840
(415) 514-0507
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