Objective

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.

Methods

Using different series of keywords, we searched six databases, PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, CINAHL, Business Source Complete, and PAIS, for peer-reviewed journal articles analyzing pharmaceutical corporations’ internal documents. We completed the scoping review using a purposive snowball sampling method to extract relevant case studies and peer-reviewed journal articles from relevant articles’ reference lists when our search keywords failed to capture them. To analyze the content of the literature and better categorize the types of corporate strategies at play in the pharmaceutical sector, we used categories of ghost-management previously developed in the literature.