'Conflict of Interest' Disclosure in Health Science: Inadequate Information and a Tool for Enforcing Orthodoxy

摘要

Disclosure of conflicts of interest (COI) in public health sciences simultaneously fail to accomplish what they are supposed to, while contributing to scientific bias and personal discrimination. COI disclosures should allow reviewers and readers to understand personal and political motives that might give authors incentives to bias their results, and to know what role flinders played in a study, but such information is almost never reported. Our reviews and examples show that reviewers and readers are almost always denied information about authors' important COIs when the authors are part of the political orthodoxy. However, despite the general acceptance of unreported major COIs, there is intense pressure to report the far less informative identity (only) of funders. Since this offers little useful information about motives, it is used primarily to identify researchers who are not affiliated with the orthodoxy and thus have sought funding from alternative sources. The funding is then used as a rationale for dismissing the disfavored results without regard to their scientific merit. The peer review process should assess the merits of analyses and vet them in spite of any COI. Instead, COI disclosure is primarily used to focus on politics-of-identity, thereby becoming a substitute for legitimate scientific analysis.