Políticas de declaración de conflictos de interés en revistas biomédicas españolas de orientación clínica

Abstract

Professional and financial ties between the pharmaceutical industry and persons and institutions carrying out research, conducting medical training, and practicing medicine can lead to individual or corporate interests influencing decision-making and professional judgment. These conflicts of interest threaten the integrity of research, the objectivity of medical education, the quality of patient care and, more generally, public confidence in medicine. A strategy to protect research integrity and maintain public trust is for authors to communicate their possible conflicts of interest in the studies they publish. This paper analyses the editorial policies of the 16 clinically oriented biomedical journals published in Spain that were included in the JCR in 2011, in relation to authors’ conflict of interest declarations. Results show that, in their instructions to authors, most journals mention the need to disclose possible conflicts of interest and offer some sort of description of such situations. However, the definitions are lax concerning which economic relations should be declared and do not specify the extent of personal relationships. In most cases there is no standard form for declaring conflicts of interest; there is no indication of the period of time during which a relationship can be considered likely to generate a conflict; there is no indication of who will evaluate these statements and how they will be evaluated; and there is no indication as to whether these statements will be published in the articles.