So you’ve found a competing interest disclosure. Now what?

Published research varies across a spectrum that at one end is simply marketing masquerading as genuine inquiry. Actors in lab coats. To counter this problem, every time research is published in a journal, the authors are expected to declare anything that might have affected their impartiality in that work. Unfortunately, we very rarely do anything with those disclosures. It is as if by disclosing a potential competing interest, any effects on the research are supposed to either magically disappear or readers will somehow be able to magically account for their influence on the conclusions.

Let’s say you are reading a news story about a clinical trial that shows multivitamins will help your children grow up to be smarter, taller, healthier, and stronger. Seems to good to be true? You ask: “Is there a chance that the research has been distorted to make it look better than it really is?” so you try to find a link to the actual article so that you can check to see who the researchers are… and evaluate the quality of the research to determine its validity in context.

It’s actually much harder to do than it sounds, because for a substantial proportion of published articles, authors have failed to disclose things that would be defined as a potential competing interest by any standard definition. And in most cases, the competing interest disclosures are hidden behind paywalls, so you won’t be able to check the disclosures unless you have a subscription (or pay to “rent” the article, or use Sci-Hub to access it for free).

Then you ask: “What should I actually do if I encounter a competing interest disclosure?” At the moment, you have one of the following options: (a) you could either ignore the disclosure and take the research at face value; (b) you can throw the research out and ignore it because the research findings may be compromised; or (c) you could apply the best tools we have available for measuring the risk of bias even though we know they won’t always catch the nuanced ways in which research designs and reporting can be distorted.

Or more simply:  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So while we know that competing interests cause the kinds of biases that can lead to widespread harm, they also introduce substantial uncertainty into biomedical research because we simply don’t know if we can safely use research findings to inform our decision-making regardless of whether the authors have disclosed their potential competing interests or not.

But I think a solution to the problem is on its way. The first and most important step in that solution is to bring competing interests disclosures out into the open in ways that we can actually use. We need them to be made public, structured in a proper taxonomy instead of a bunch of free text descriptions, and accessible – in ways that both humans and machines can interpret and make use of.

That is why we think a comprehensive public registry of competing interest disclosures for all researchers is a good idea. People have been working on similar ideas for a while, and we have put many of these things in the review we published in the new journal, Research Integrity and Peer Review.

• If you are interested, be sure to check out the IOM report (check the review), and read between the lines to try and understand why there might have been some disagreements about the best ways to deal with competing interests. This work eventually led to Convey, which has some similar goals but is not necessarily aimed at being comprehensive, and seems to be progressing nicely towards a different kind of goal from the updates on the webpage.
• One of the things we didn’t include in the review because I hadn’t seen it until too late, is this browser plugin, which uses information from PMC to display funding and competing interests statements alongside the abstracts in PubMed. You could always click on the PMC link and scroll down to try and find them, but this is a neat idea.
• It turns out that the idea for creating a standard list of competing interests and maintaining them in a public space was proposed as early as 2007, by Gordon Rubenfeld, in a letter to The Lancet. Maybe it is finally the right time to do this properly.
• If you are a researcher and you like what you see in the first issue of the Research Integrity and Peer Review journal, then please consider publishing your research there. Besides the very interesting and high-profile editorial board, you might even have your manuscript handled by me as an associate editor.

Of course there are more things that will need to be done once we can manage for a much more comprehensive, consistent, and accessible way to disclose competing interests in research, but those come down to treating competing interests just like any other confounding variable. We are currently working on both methods and policies that will help us populate the registry in a longitudinal fashion (i.e. a timeline for every researcher who has published anything in biomedical research), and keep it up to date. We are also working on ways to take existing free text disclosures and classify them according to how much of an influence they have had over research findings in the past, and on a scale that has been virtually impossible until very recently.

Also, check out a more precise description of the idea in this related opinion piece published in Nature today. As usual, I will add to this post and link to any responses, media, comments, interesting tweets, etc. below as I spot them online.

• The opinion piece was mentioned in the weekend reads at Retraction Watch.
• John Ross covered the proposal in the Higher Education section of The Australian.
• I wrote a bit more about the topic for This Week at Macquarie Univeristy.
• I was interviewed on the idea for Radio National’s Health Report with Joel Werner.