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Financial Conflicts Not Disclosed, Says Group
By Gwendolyn Bradley
Four prominent medicine and science journals do not enforce their own policies for disclosure of financial conflicts of interest, according to a study by the Center for Science in the Public Interest. The center examined 163 articles published in the journals and identified 24 instances in which authors did not disclose conflicts of interest. In thirteen of those instances, according to the report, the undisclosed conflicts violated the journals' own policies. Of the four journals studied, the Journal of the American Medical Association had the highest rate of nondisclosure of conflicts, at 11.3 percent, while the New England Journal of Medicine had the lowest rate of nondisclosure at 4.8 percent. The other two journals studied were Environmental Health Perspectives and Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology.
In one case, the report says, a medical professor published an article describing the potential usefulness of a treatment for multiple myeloma without disclosing that he intended to apply for a patent on the treatment's underlying technology or that he was a paid consultant for drug companies developing vaccines for the condition. In another, a scientist employed by Procter and Gamble was not identified as such in an article validating a toxicity test that would likely be used on Procter and Gamble products.
Published research that does not disclose researchers' ties to drug companies threatens the credibility of scientific journals and undermines public confidence in studies about drug safety and efficacy, the center said. Spokespeople for the journals agreed that such disclosure is important, and defended their records of enforcing their disclosure policies, especially given the high volume of submissions that they receive.
"We can't do background research on our authors," says Thomas Goehl, editor-in-chief of Environmental Health Perspectives, adding that the journal relies on authors to provide information about potential conflicts of interest. His journal has taken the report seriously, he notes, and has adopted some of its recommendations. The journal has added language to its nondisclosure policy urging authors to disclose anything that could conceivably be perceived as a conflict, and it has specified punitive measures for noncompliance. The measures, Goehl says, range from a "note of concern"—to be posted on the journal's Web site with articles whose authors failed, perhaps accidentally, to disclose minor conflicts—to a three-year banishment from the journal for serious violators.
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