Abstract
I examine the relationship across diseases between the long-run growth in the number of publications about a disease and the change in the mortality rate from the disease. The diseases analyzed are almost all the different forms of cancer. The National Cancer Institute publishes annual data on cancer incidence and cancer mortality, by cancer site. Failure to control for the growth in incidence (which is not feasible for non-cancer diseases) may bias estimates of the effect of publication growth towards zero, because growth in the number of publications is positively correlated across diseases with growth in incidence. Time-series data on the number of publications pertaining to each cancer site were obtained from PubMed. For articles published since 1975, it is possible to distinguish between publications indicating and not indicating any research funding support. My estimates indicate that mortality rates: (1) are unrelated to the (current or lagged) stock of publications that had not received research funding; (2) are only weakly inversely related to the contemporaneous stock of published articles that received research funding; and (3) are strongly inversely related to the stock of articles that had received research funding and been published 5 and 10 years earlier.