Few Scientific Journals Disclose Authors' Potential Conflicts of Interest, Study Finds By GOLDIE BLUMENSTYK
Very few scientific or biomedical journals report the financial interests of authors that relate to the research they are writing about, a study on disclosure policies has found.
This is so even for journals that have conflict-of-interest policies, the study shows, and for journals with policies calling for such conflicts to be reported.
"Something's off," said Sheldon Krimsky, a co-author of a report on the study, which examined the disclosures in more than 61,000 articles of 181 journals in 1997.
Although it is generally acknowledged that such financial interests are becoming more prevalent, disclosures were found in only 0.5 percent of the articles examined in the study.
Among the 181 journals, 119 published no disclosures, and an additional 37 published disclosures in no more than 1 percent of their articles. Only three journals published disclosures in more than 10 percent of their articles.
Of the 1,396 most frequently cited scientific and biomedical journals, the 181 in the study were the only ones that made their policies publicly available in 1997.
Because a majority of the 181 journals said that their policy was to publish financial interests disclosed to them, and because biomedical science is increasingly commercial, Mr. Krimsky and his co-author concluded that "poor compliance is the more likely explanation for the low disclosure rates in most journals."
His co-author is L. S. Rothenberg, a bioethicist at the University of California at Los Angeles. Mr. Krimsky is a professor of urban and environmental policy at Tufts University. Their findings appear in the April issue of Science and Engineering Ethics, released today.
Mr. Krimsky said many of the policies may themselves be the problem, because they "are not explicit enough." For instance, few specify the kinds of interests that could be considered a conflict for a researcher, like consulting for a drug company that makes a product that competes with the one being evaluated.
The study also provides information from a survey of journal editors on how they use the disclosures they receive. Twenty-four of 128 respondents said they had rejected manuscripts primarily because of an author's potential conflict of interest. An additional 25 of them said they had rejected articles because of potential conflicts in conjunction with other factors.
Only 47 of 132 journal editors said they made it a practice to request financial conflict-of-interest information from researchers they selected to peer-review articles, but 77 out of 104 editors said they had asked editors and reviewers to disqualify themselves if they perceived a conflict of interest.