Disclosure of patenting activities within scientific publications as potential conflicts-of-interest: Evidences from biomedical literature

Abstract

Most scientific publishers require authors to submit their manuscripts with a text reporting their parallel activities which might be considered as Conflicts-of-Interest (COI), including patent-related ones. The patenting activities that are disclosed by authors or institutions as COI in articles within Conflicts-of-Interest Statements (COIS) are generally analyzed in the literature either within small datasets or using non-systematic methodologies. This study proposes methods for assessing COIS presence and their main features across biomedical topics and journals, particularly with respect to the patent filing details that may be disclosed herein. These methods have been established and tested in the freely available PubMed database by searching the literature indexed herein during the period 2011–2022. However, when comparing the results of such searches within PubMed and a selection of journals’ websites for a specific topic (such as COVID-19), COIS appear unevenly available and searchable in PubMed owing to the varying practices that each journal implements. Thus, COIS appear a possibly underestimated source of patent information but the search and analysis of COI disclosures in biomedical literature requires well-designed and controlled strategies for identifying the relevant evidences for a given scope, such as prior art analysis and legal or strategic evaluation of patenting activities.