Abstract
Conflicts of interest arising from ties between pharmaceutical industry and physicians are common and may bias research. The extent to which these ties exist among editorial board members of medical journals is not known. This study aims to determine the prevalence and financial magnitude of potential conflicts of interest among editorial board members of five leading spine journals. The editorial boards of: The Spine Journal; Spine; European Spine Journal; Journal of Neurosurgery: Spine; and Journal of Spinal Disorders & Techniques were extracted on January 2013 from the journals’ websites. Disclosure statements were retrieved from the 2013 disclosure index of the North American Spine Society; the program of the 20th International Meeting on Advanced Spine Techniques; the program of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Scoliosis Research Society; the program of the AOSpine global spine congress; the presentations of the 2013 Annual Eurospine meeting; and the disclosure index of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. Names of the editorial board members were compared with the individuals who completed a disclosure for one of these indexes. Disclosures were extracted when full names matched. Two hundred and ten (29%) of the 716 identified editorial board members reported a potential conflict of interest and 154 (22%) reported nothing to disclose. The remaining 352 (49%) editorial board members had no disclosure statement listed for one of the indexes. Eighty-nine (42%) of the 210 editorial board members with a potential conflict of interest reported a financial relationship of more than $10,000 during the prior year. This finding confirms that potential conflicts of interest exist in editorial boards which might influence the peer review process and can result in bias. Academia and medical journals in particular should be aware of this and strive to improve transparency of the review process. We emphasize recommendations that contribute to achieving this goal.
Highlights
The spinal surgery community has recently witnessed serious controversies and discussion concerning possible bias in scientific reports on the effects of a commercially available bone morphogenetic protein
Financial and nonfinancial relationships between industry and editorial board members generate a dilemma: ties between pharmaceutical or medical device industry and the scientific journals are considered essential for sharing state-of-the-art scientific knowledge and moving the field of medicine forwards, these ties may at the same time create conflicts of interest, compromise the objectivity of the review process, and result in bias [4, 14, 22]
In this study we aimed to quantify the potential conflicts of interest of editorial board members of five leading spine journals
Summary
The spinal surgery community has recently witnessed serious controversies and discussion concerning possible bias in scientific reports on the effects of a commercially available bone morphogenetic protein. Financial and nonfinancial relationships between pharmaceutical or medical device industry, physicians, investigators, and academic institutions are common and generally considered essential for development of new technologies and advancement in medicine [5, 6]. These ties may at the same time create conflicts of interest: a set of circumstances that creates a risk that professional judgments or actions regarding a primary interest will be unduly influenced by a secondary interest [7]. Reviewers are often selected and approached by editors to review a manuscript; they are usually not paid and often have no formal relationship other than voluntary service as a reviewer
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