A new study published in the journal Cancer reportedly looks at conflict of interest in oncology publications. The authors, Dr. Aaron S. Kesselheim, Joy L. Lee, Dr. Jerry Avorn, Dr. Amber Servi, Dr. William H. Shrank and Dr. Niteesh K. Choudhry, have sought to define current disclosure policies and how they relate to disclosure statements provided by authors in major oncology journals. The study has observed that economic ties that may bias drug trials could possibly be hidden because of unclear disclosure rules at medical journals.
The authors have reportedly identified all oncology journals listed in the Thomson Institute for Scientific Information and sought their policies on conflict-of-interest disclosure. For a subset of journals with an Impact Factor over 2.0, they catalogued the number and type of articles and the details of the published disclosures in all papers from the two most recent issues.
Disclosure policies were provided by 112 of 131 journals. Ninety nine of these requested that authors disclose conflicts of interest, whereas the remaining 13 did not. Ninety-three journals required financial disclosure, and 42 also sought non-financial disclosures. For a subset of 52 higher-impact journals, the authors reviewed 1,734 articles and identified published disclosures in 51 journals. Many of these included some disclosure statement in over 90 percent of their articles. Among 27 journals that published editorials/commentaries, only 14 included disclosures with such articles. There was no publication of any non-financial conflicts of interest in any article reviewed.
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