In deciding what research to publish and how to appraise it, medical journals bear a heavy responsibility – as seen when it goes awry. In 1998, for instance, the Lancet published a paper falsely linking autism with the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine. They retracted the paper, but the genie was out of the bottle: the ensuing health scare reverberates to this day.
The British-born doctor and editor Drummond Rennie, who has died aged 89, was a towering figure in American medical journals, on a mission to combat inaccuracy in science reporting and drive up standards. A cartoon in the British Medical Journal in 2001 depicted him as a biblical prophet, beckoning his fellow medical editors towards “the promised land” of rigorous science reporting. He was the deputy editor of two of the world’s most influential medical journals: the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), from 1977 to 1981; and the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), from 1983 to 2013.
When Rennie started at the NEJM, the journal had just published an article about patients with schizophrenia having low levels of the enzyme monoamine oxidase. He was disturbed to see the same research in another journal concluding differently, saying the enzyme levels were normal. The more Rennie studied, the more he found: medical literature seemed to be riddled with anomalies, errors and shortcomings. In 1986 he summed up: “There are scarcely any bars to eventual publication. There seems to be no study too fragmented, no hypothesis too trivial, no literature citation too biased or too egotistical, no design too warped, no methodology too bungled, no presentation of results too inaccurate, too obscure, and too contradictory, no analysis too self-serving, no argument too circular, no conclusions too trifling or too unjustified, and no grammar and syntax too offensive for a paper to end up in print.”
A special place in hell in Rennie’s view was reserved for people who wilfully manipulated the scientific record
Peer review is at the heart of the journal publishing process. When deciding whether to publish a research paper, the journal editor sends it to experts to assess. Rennie was concerned about bias creeping in. Did reviewers, for example, look more favourably on papers written by academics known to them? He also worried that peer review simply was not doing its job: it was supposed to winnow out mistakes, but he was finding myriad problems in printed articles.
Wanting to apply scientific scrutiny to the whole medical journal publishing process, in 1989 Rennie inaugurated the International Congress on Peer Review and Scientific Publication. Held every four years, it is a forum for journal editors and researchers to drive up standards and “enhance the quality and credibility of science”. Rennie was its director and then director emeritus to the end of his life.
As codes of practice emerged for how to evaluate research, JAMA published guidelines for reporting randomised controlled trials in 1994, with a structured checklist to standardise how information was presented. This led to a set of rules called the Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (Consort), which medical journals could sign up to. Rennie also lobbied to have all trials registered at their start and records kept of their outcomes. This was to combat the practice of trials that were unsuccessful vanishing without trace, so clinicians had no idea of drugs or treatments that did not work. In 2000 the US government brought in the clinicaltrials.gov registry, requiring researchers to register their trial.
A special place in hell in Rennie’s view was reserved for people who wilfully manipulated the scientific record. In 1994, a whistleblower, “Mr Butts”, at the Brown and Williamson Tobacco Corporation sent 4,000 pages of company reports, letters and memos to a doctor at the University of California. The papers made their way to JAMA, and in an editorial Rennie scathingly called out the company, laying out how they had schemed to suppress the scientific record by hiding research that nicotine was addictive. He served on the US government’s Commission of Research Integrity and helped tighten up its rules on scientific misconduct in 1995.
As well as driving up standards, Rennie wanted to improve how clinicians on the frontline make use of research. He set up the evidence-based medicine working group at JAMA, which published a series of 32 articles in the journal between 1993 and 2000. Called Users’ Guides to the Medical Literature – and later bound into a book with the same name – they brought evidence-based medicine into the mainstream, teaching doctors to critically appraise medical literature and integrate the best evidence into their practice.
Rennie was born near Leeds, one of the three children of John, a British cardiologist, and Isabella (nee Wiese), a Danish-American physician. He was educated at Winchester college, before studying medicine at Cambridge University. After training at Guy’s and the Royal Brompton hospitals in London, he specialised in nephrology (kidney medicine). Taking advantage of his dual nationality, in 1967 he moved to the US to work for the nephrologist Robert “Googoo” Kark at the Presbyterian-St Luke’s hospital in Chicago.
In London, Rennie had met Silvia Nussio, whom he married in 1958. Visiting her family in Switzerland, he was at first daunted by the altitudes in the Alps. That rapidly changed, and he developed a lifelong passion for mountaineering, which he was able to combine with work, joining expeditions all over the world to provide medical care and also to study the effect of high altitudes on the body. In 1970, he led an American medical relief effort in a mountainous area of Peru following an earthquake.
Publishing papers on altitude medicine and nephrology in the Lancet and JAMA acquainted Rennie with the world of medical journals and he was curious to know more. In 1977 he left nephrology to become the deputy editor at NEJM. He was content to stay as deputy editor both there and at JAMA, as the “top job” came with pressures he did not care for, such as keeping management and advertisers on side.
He did, however, combine his editorial work with teaching in universities: while at NEJM he was professor of medicine at Rush Medical College in Chicago, and when he moved to California to work for JAMA, he became adjunct professor of medicine at the University of California.
In 1984 his marriage ended in divorce. In 1992 he married Deborah Peltzman, a data scientist. The couple loved being outdoors and, after he retired, they moved with their St Bernard dog to a “house in the woods” in Oregon, where he could hike, read and appreciate nature.
Rennie is survived by Deborah, and by two children, Caroline and Nicholas, from his first marriage, and two granddaughters. His sisters, Jane and Isabel, both predeceased him.
Ian Drummond Brownlee Rennie, editor and nephrologist, born 31 January 1936; died 12 September 2025
