Berdahl Carl T, Addo Newton, Callaham Michael L
Departments of Medicine and Emergency Medicine Cedars-Sinai Medical Center Los Angeles California 90048 USA.
Departments of Emergency Medicine and Medicine University of California, San Francisco San Francisco California USA.
J Am Coll Emerg Physicians Open. 2022 Mar 26;3(2):e12680. doi: 10.1002/emp2.12680. eCollection 2022 Apr.
Although current ethical standards mandate conflict of interest (COI) disclosure by authors of peer-reviewed publications, it is unknown whether disclosure affects a manuscript's fate. Our objective was to identify associations between author COI disclosure and editorial decision to publish.
We performed a cross-sectional observational study of editorial decisions for original research and brief research report manuscripts submitted to between June 2014 and January 2018 using data from the journal's editorial decision software and data from a prior study that characterized author COI for the same manuscripts. Outcomes of interest included final editor decision to publish (primary), initial editor decision, and number of revisions. We compared outcomes for manuscripts with COI versus those without and by type of COI (commercial/government/other).
Out of 1312 manuscripts in the sample, 65.1% had no COI declarations, and 34.9% had one or more. Overall likelihood of editorial decision to publish was 13.5% (115/854) for articles without COI and 26.9% (123/458) for those with COI. Overall likelihood of editorial decision to publish was 19.8% (19/96) for articles with commercial COI only versus 33.3% (35/105) for those with government COI only.
Articles with author-reported COI were more likely to be published than those without such a declaration. Additionally, results suggest that reports of government COI are associated with improved chance of publication. Authorities should consider relaxing COI requirements temporarily to allow investigators to perform larger scale, randomized controlled studies of the impact of mandated COI disclosure.
尽管当前的伦理标准要求同行评审出版物的作者披露利益冲突（COI），但尚不清楚披露是否会影响稿件的命运。我们的目的是确定作者利益冲突披露与编辑出版决定之间的关联。
我们使用该期刊编辑决策软件中的数据以及先前一项研究的数据（该研究对同一稿件的作者利益冲突进行了特征描述），对2014年6月至2018年1月提交给该期刊的原创研究和简短研究报告稿件的编辑决策进行了横断面观察性研究。感兴趣的结果包括编辑最终决定发表（主要结果）、编辑初步决定以及修订次数。我们比较了有利益冲突的稿件与无利益冲突的稿件以及不同类型利益冲突（商业/政府/其他）稿件的结果。
在样本中的1312篇稿件中，65.1%没有利益冲突声明，34.9%有一个或多个声明。无利益冲突的文章编辑决定发表的总体可能性为13.5%（115/854），有利益冲突的文章为26.9%（123/458）。仅具有商业利益冲突的文章编辑决定发表的总体可能性为19.8%（19/96），而仅具有政府利益冲突的文章为33.3%（35/105）。
有作者报告利益冲突的文章比没有此类声明的文章更有可能发表。此外，结果表明政府利益冲突报告与发表机会的提高有关。当局应考虑暂时放宽利益冲突要求，以便研究人员能够对强制披露利益冲突的影响进行更大规模的随机对照研究。
