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Medical Journals Strengthen Ethics Requirements
Editors of twelve medical journals announced this fall new ethics guidelines that, among other measures, will require authors of published articles, including editorials and review articles, to disclose all financial and personal relationships that "could be viewed as presenting a potential conflict of interest."
Revisions to the ethics section of a widely used biomedical publishing manual on which the journals rely also specify that researchers should avoid agreements with sponsors that may limit their ability to access, analyze, or publish data, and that they must disclose any role that sponsors have in designing studies, collecting or interpreting data, writing reports, or deciding when to publish results. In addition, the editors will not accept manuscripts based on studies conducted under conditions allowing sponsors solely to control or withhold publication of data. The group includes editors of some of the most prestigious medical journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association, the New England Journal of Medicine, and Lancet.
In recent years, concerns have been raised about the ability of corporate sponsors to suppress research results that cast their products in an unfavorable light and about the objectivity of researchers being compromised by their financial involvement with the companies that sponsor research. (For more information on this topic and on the AAUP's position on it, see "Conflict of Interest Guidelines Proposedquot; on page 4 of the May-June 2001 issue of Academe and the Statement on Corporate Funding of Academic Research on page 68 of the same issue.)
Noting that most decisions about medical treatment are ultimately based on the published findings of clinical trials, the editors say that the public assumes that data from such trials have been gathered, and are presented, in an objective manner. But, they note, this "precious objectivity" may be threatened by current research conditions that increasingly put corporate sponsors, instead of scientific investigators, in control of the design of clinical trials and of the interpretation and dissemination of their results. "[T]he use of clinical trials primarily for marketing," the editors say, "makes a mockery of clinical investigation and is a misuse of a powerful tool."
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