Do Canadian Researchers and the Lay Public Prioritize Biomedical Research Outcomes Equally? A Choice Experiment

Purpose: Academic medicine must increasingly measure the ‘return on investment’ ofbiomedical research, and justify these returns to key stakeholders. Whether citizens, and thegovernments that represent them in funding basic, biomedical research, prioritize the samereturns as researchers warrants consideration.Methods: In autumn 2010, through a cross-sectional, national survey of basic biomedicalresearchers funded by Canada’s national health research agency, and a representative sampleof Canadian residents, the authors assessed preferences for research impacts across 5attributes using a discrete choice experiment: advancing scientific knowledge (papers),building research capacity (trainees), informing decisions in the health products industry(patents), targeting economic, health or scientific priorities, and cost. A fractional factorialdesign (18 pairwise choices plus opt-out) was reduced to three blocks of six. Part worthutilities, differences in predicted probabilities, and willingness-to-pay values were computedusing nested logit models.Results: 1,749 researchers (55.17% response rate) and 1,002 internet panellists completedthe survey. Researchers and citizens prioritized high quality scientific outputs (papers,trainees) over other attributes; patents licensed by industry ranked third. Both groupsdisvalued research targeted at economic priorities relative to health priorities. Researchersgranted a premium to proposals targeting scientific priorities.Conclusions: Citizens and researchers shared fundamental preferences for the impacts ofbasic biomedical research. Notably, traditional scientific outputs were prioritized, and thepursuit of economic returns was disvalued. These findings have implications for academicmedicine in incenting and valuing basic health research, and for how biomedical researchersand the public may jointly contribute to research priority setting.