Full disclosure
22 October, 2010 | Richard P. Grant |
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Do you receive more than a million dollars in consulting fees? Did you declare it when you published that paper?
Probably not, according to a paper in Arch Intern Med, From Disclosure to Transparency: The Use of Company Payment Data1.
The study is the first to definitively document under-reporting of author financial relationships in the medical literature and has important policy implications.
Current policies, based on self-reporting, are inadequate to ensure complete disclosure of financial interests. There are a number of potential reasons why authors don’t disclose conflicts of interest, from embarrassment or ignorance to downright dishonesty. How can the situation be improved?
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