JAMA May Penalize Authors Who Hide Corporate Ties

Last week, the Journal of the American Medical Association ran two studies that showed the medical publishing industry has been played like a fiddle by the drug industry. The first revealed that Merck had employed ghost-writers on dozens of published Vioxx studies. A second alleged that a company-funded review of studies involving Alzheimer's and dementia patients had manipulated data to hide the drug’s dangers.

In an accompanying editorial, the editors of JAMA called for steeper penalties on authors who fail to disclose conflicts of interest, hide or manipulate data, or claim to have done work actually done by others. The proposed penalties ranged from requiring public letters of apology to a ban on publishing in the journal.

“When integrity in medical science or practice is impugned or threatened—such as by the influence of industry—patients, clinicians, and researchers are all at risk for harm, and public trust in research is jeopardized,” editor-in-chief Catherine DeAngelis and deputy editor Phil Fontanarosa wrote.

That editorial marks a hardening of attitudes by some journal editors toward repeated failures by scientists to reveal their financial ties to industry. In August 2006, DeAngelis rejected a ban on authors who failed to disclose conflicts of interest, claiming authors would simply seek out other journals. “It cleans our house by messing others,” she wrote then. The shift came just a few weeks after JAMA published corrections involving radiologists who failed to disclose their lung cancer screening study had been funded by the tobacco industry.

Notably absent so far from the debate is the New England Journal of Medicine, which got caught in another scandal last week (it also had not disclosed the tobacco-lung cancer screening connection). This one, revealed in the Wall Street Journal, involved an author of an article claiming tanning improved vitamin D uptake who failed to disclose his ties to the tanning industry trade group.

Portions of this item first appeared in Integrity in Science Watch, a publication of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.