---
title: "Peter C. Gøtzsche"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Peter C. Gøtzsche"
aliases: ["Gøtzsche","Peter Gotzsche"]
first_seen: "2026-11-03T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["citation bias","evidence-based medicine","reference bias","clinical-trial methodology","Robert K. Merton"]
seek_code_commit: "d40ee39"
---


Danish physician and clinical-trial methodologist, co-founder of the Cochrane Collaboration, whose 1987 *BMJ* report is — by his own later account — likely the first documented demonstration of citation bias in a systematic review of healthcare trials. Matters to this vault as the foundational figure the clinical-epidemiology citation-bias lineage measures itself against, the way the bibliometric Matthew-effect lineage measures itself against [[entity-robert-merton|Merton]]: his 1987 finding, independently corroborated by Ravnskov (1992) and pooled by Duyx et al.'s 2017 meta-analysis of 52 studies, names the same legitimation-selection citation mechanism the vault's [[moc-legitimation-not-origination]] cluster documents by case study, decades before either that cluster or [[claim-greenberg-2009-citation-bias-names-selective-ignoring-of-contrary-data|Greenberg's 2009 citation-network paper]] arrived at the same mechanism independently.

## References
- [[claim-gotzsche-1987-first-demonstration-of-citation-bias-corroborated-by-ravnskov-and-duyx]]
- Captures: 2026-11-03-does-citation-studies-or-sociology-of-science-literature