Shining a light on conflict of interest statements
Authors either have a conflict of interest or not, right? Wrong. Research from Digital Science has uncovered a tangled web of missing statements, errors, and subterfuge, which highlights the need for a more careful appraisal of published research. At this year’s World Conference on Research Integrity , a team of researchers from Digital Science led by Pritha Sarkar presented a poster with findings from their deep dive on conflict of interest (COI) statements. Entitled Conflict of Interest: A data driven approach to categorisation of COI statements , the initial goal was to look at COI statements with a view to creating a binary model that determines whether a Conflict of Interest statement is present or not in an article. However, all was not as it seemed. While some articles had no COI and some had one present, those present covered a number of different areas, which led the team to think COIs might represent a spectrum rather than binary options. Gold standard Conflict of inter