What did the scientific literature learn from internal company documents in the pharmaceutical industry: A scoping review dataset

The objective of our scoping review is to identify all scientific papers that used internal industry documents in the pharmaceutical sector and analyze what and how the scientific literature learned about corporate influence in the pharmaceutical sector through these internal documents. The scoping review allows to explore the systematic strategies used by drug companies to influence scientific knowledge, professional practices, public policy, and public opinion for their corporate interests. When it comes to public health and healthcare research, internal company documents often serve as unique sources for evidence of corporate activities in pursuit of strategic goals. We identified 37 papers in the final results. All articles obtained most of their internal document data through legal proceedings. All 37 articles unveil dynamic ghost-management strategies that pharmaceutical corporations employ to safeguard their corporate interest. The strategies identified relate to scientific capture (n=28), professional capture (n=16), regulatory capture (n=6), media capture (n=3), market capture (n=4), technological capture (n=2), civil society capture (n=4) and others (n=2).