corner
Healthy Skepticism
Join us to help reduce harm from misleading health information.
Increase font size   Decrease font size   Print-friendly view   Print
Register Log in

Healthy Skepticism Library item: 17264

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: Journal Article

Blum JA, Freeman K, Dart RC, Cooper RJ
Requirements and Definitions in Conflict of Interest Policies of Medical Journals
JAMA 2009 Nov 25; 302:(20):2230-2234.
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/302/20/2230?etoc


Abstract:

Context Conflicts of interest (COIs) may influence medical literature. However, it is unclear whether medical journals have consistent policies for defining and soliciting COI disclosures.

Objective To determine the prevalence of author COI policies, requirements for signed disclosure statements, and variability in COI definitions among medical journals.

Design A cross-sectional survey of Instructions for Authors and manuscript submission documents, including authorship responsibility forms, for high-impact medical journals across 35 subject categories available from March through October 2008.

Main Outcome Measure Presence of language referring to COI disclosure in the Instructions for Authors or manuscript submission documents.

Results Of 256 journals, 89% had author COI policies. Fifty-four percent required authors to sign a disclosure statement, and 77% provided definitions of COI. Most definitions were limited to direct financial relationships; a minority of journals requested disclosure of other potential conflicts such as personal relationships (42%), paid expert testimony (42%), relationships with other organizations (26%), or travel grants (12%). The prevalence of policies varied by subject category: all internal medicine, respiratory medicine, and toxicology journals studied had comprehensive COI definitions, with 19 of these 24 journals requiring signed disclosure attestations. In contrast, 6 of 19 geriatrics, radiology, and rehabilitation journals requested author COI disclosure. Most journals that officially endorsed International Committee of Medical Journal Editors guidelines had COI policies (68/69), compared with 84% of journals not endorsing the guidelines (158/187).

Conclusions In 2008, most medical journals with relatively high impact factors had author COI policies available for public review. Among journals, there was substantial variation in policies for solicitation of author COIs and in definitions of COI.

 

  Healthy Skepticism on RSS   Healthy Skepticism on Facebook   Healthy Skepticism on Twitter

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
Click to Log in
for free access to more features of this website.

Forgot your username or password?

You are invited to
apply for membership
of Healthy Skepticism,
if you support our aims.

Pay a subscription

Support our work with a donation

Buy Healthy Skepticism T Shirts


If there is something you don't like, please tell us. If you like our work, please tell others.

Email a Friend








Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909