Waikato Clinical Campus, University of Auckland, Hamilton, New Zealand.
, Hamilton, New Zealand.
J Gen Intern Med. 2018 Feb;33(2):139-141. doi: 10.1007/s11606-017-4225-5.
Inadequate competing interest declarations present interpretive challenges for editors, reviewers, and readers. We systematically studied a common euphemism, 'unpaid consultant,' to determine its occurrence in declarations and its association with vested interests, authors, and journals.
We used Google Scholar, a search engine that routinely includes disclosures, to identify 1164 occurrences and 787 unique biomedical journal publications between 1994 and 2014 that included one or more authors declaring themselves as an "unpaid consultant." Changes over time were reckoned with absolute and relative yearly rates, the latter normalized by overall biomedical publication volumes. We further analyzed declarations according to author, consultancy recipient, and journal.
We demonstrate increases in the use of "unpaid consultant" since 2004 and show that such uninformative declarations are overwhelmingly (801/865, 92.6%) associated with for-profit companies and other vested interests, most notably in the pharmaceutical, device, and biotech industries.
Disclosing 'unpaid' relationships with for-profit companies typically signals but does not explain competing interests. Our findings challenge editors to respond to the increasing use of language that may conceal rather than illuminate conflicts of interest.
不充分的利益冲突申报给编辑、审稿人和读者带来了解读上的挑战。我们系统性地研究了一种常见的委婉语“无薪顾问”，以确定其在申报中的出现情况及其与既得利益、作者和期刊的关联。
我们使用 Google Scholar，这是一个常规包含披露信息的搜索引擎，以确定在 1994 年至 2014 年间发表的包含一个或多个作者自称“无薪顾问”的 1164 次出现和 787 篇独特的生物医学期刊文章。使用绝对和相对年增长率来计算时间上的变化，后者通过整体生物医学出版物数量进行标准化。我们进一步根据作者、咨询接受者和期刊分析申报情况。
我们证明了自 2004 年以来“无薪顾问”的使用有所增加，并且表明这种不具信息量的申报绝大多数（801/865，92.6%）与营利性公司和其他既得利益相关，尤其是在制药、医疗器械和生物技术行业。
披露与营利性公司的“无薪”关系通常表明存在利益冲突，但并未解释利益冲突。我们的研究结果挑战编辑们对日益使用可能掩盖而非阐明利益冲突的语言做出回应。
