From today’s Wall Street Journal, Surgery Journal Threatens Ban for Authors’ Hidden Conflicts (subscription required, emphases mine):
With conflicts of interest increasingly casting doubt on the credibility of medical research, a leading surgery journal is cracking down on authors who fail to disclose links to industry, threatening to temporarily blacklist them.
The surgical society that owns the journal approved the penalties for “future violations” after learning that researchers for two studies it published this year didn’t reveal financial ties to the maker of heart-surgery equipment that they evaluated favorably.
The action comes as many medical journals struggle with the burgeoning links between researchers and industry. While some of the major medical journals started requiring financial disclosures in the 1980s, most publications didn’t begin to ask about potential conflicts until the past decade. Some editors have complained it is hard to find reviewers and study authors who don’t have potential conflicts of interest. Last year, the British medical journal Lancet said undisclosed conflicts of interest undermined a study it published that suggested childhood vaccinations could cause autism. Lancet said the study’s lead author didn’t disclose he was working on a study for lawyers considering legal action against vaccine makers.
Disclosing industry connections is critical because many physicians make treatment decisions based on data published in medical journals, and need to be able to evaluate their credibility. “Even though we believe the information in the study is sufficiently well-documented, they need to know that the person who authored the article may have a relationship with the company,” says Catherine DeAngelis, editor in chief of the Journal of the American Medical Association. “I want you to make the decision on how trustworthy that information is.”
Absolutely.
The banning of authors who fail to disclose conflicts is “pretty unusual,” says Kevin Schulman, a professor of medicine and business administration at Duke University who has studied conflict policies at institutions and medical journals. At the same, Dr. Schulman says, the harsher sanction is “part of the maturation of the relationship between industry, academia and the journals. Basically there has been a constant movement over the last several years to really improve disclosure and to really improve independence.”
Dr. DeAngelis says the new policy by the surgery journal is “pretty severe, but not outlandish.” At JAMA, authors who fail to disclose relationships are not barred from publication, but their work receives extra scrutiny, she says.
As well it should. Medical school teaches skepticism, but studies published in major medical journals (such as NEJM, JAMA, BMJ, Lancet, etc) carry significant weight. A financial tie doesn’t invalidate the work, but should be disclosed. If the work is good, what is the point of non-disclosure? Also posted at RedStateMoron.
