Conflict of interest policies in science and medical journals: Editorial practices and author disclosures

This study examines the extent to which scientific and biomedical journals have adopted conflict of interest (COI) policies for authors, and whether t he adoption and content of such policies leads to the publishing of authors ' financial interest disclosure statements by such journals. In particular, it reports the results of a survey of journal editors about their practice s regarding COI disclosures. About 16 percent of 1396 highly ranked scienti fic and biomedical journals had COI policies in effect during 1997. Less th an 1 percent of the articles published during that year in the journals wit h COI policies contained any disclosures of author personal financial inter ests while nearly 66 percent of the journals had zero disclosures of author personal financial interests. Nearly three fourths of journal editors surv eyed usually publish author disclosure statements suggesting that low rates of personal financial disclosures are either a result of low rates of auth or financial interest in the subject matter of their publications or poor c ompliance by authors to the journals' COI policies.