Conflict of Interest Disclosures Don’t Alter the Recommendations of Peer Reviewers

The majority of high-quality medical and science journals require disclosure of possible conflicts of interest (COI). However, a new study suggests that such disclosures have no impact on journal reviewers, even when the authors of submitted papers did, in fact, report conflicts. The study also found that reviewers' evaluations of seven additional measures of different facets of research quality (e.g., methods, conclusions, objectivity) were similarly unaffected by COI disclosures. The study was conducted by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University , Harvard and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) . It examined the evaluations of more than 3,300 reviewers of nearly 1,500 papers submitted between 2014 and 2018 to the Annals of Emergency Medicine (AEM) . The authors believe it is the first randomly controlled experiment to examine the impact of COI disclosures on actual reviewer evaluations of research papers. In the study, reviewers received a manuscript and were either informed within 24 hours if the authors had or had not revealed a COI during the submission process or were not informed of the authors' COIs one way or the other.