ArticlePloS one2015
A Quantitative Analysis of Undisclosed Conflicts of Interest in Pharmacology Textbooks.
Article in PloS one, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Undisclosed financial conflicts of interest among physician-authors in leading US psychiatry journals: a cross-sectional study.BMJ open · 2025Article
- Conflicts of Interest in Psychopharmacology Textbooks.Community mental health journal · 2022Article
- Conflicts of interest and Scientific Societies.Neurological sciences : official journal of the Italian Neurological Society and of the Italian Society of Clinical Neurophysiology · 2020Review
- Quantification of Conflicts of Interest in an Online Point-of-Care Clinical Support Website.Science and engineering ethics · 2020Article
- A Quantitative and Narrative Evaluation of Goodman and Gilman's Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics.Pharmacy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2019Article
- Conflicts of interest among dermatology textbook authors.International journal of women's dermatology · 2019Review
- Relationship Between Declarations of Conflict of Interests and Reporting Positive Outcomes in Iranian Dental Journals.Science and engineering ethics · 2019Review
- Undisclosed conflicts of interest among biomedical textbook authors.AJOB empirical bioethicsArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundDisclosure of potential conflicts of interest (CoI) is a standard practice for many biomedical journals but not for educational materials. The goal of this investigation was to determine whether the authors of pharmacology textbooks have undisclosed financial CoIs and to identify author characteristics associated with CoIs. METHODS AND
findingsThe presence of potential CoIs was evaluated by submitting author names (N = 403; 36.3% female) to a patent database (Google Scholar) as well as a database that reports on the compensation ($USD) received from 15 pharmaceutical companies (ProPublica's Dollars for Docs). All publications (N = 410) of the ten highest compensated authors from 2009 to 2013 and indexed in Pubmed were also examined for disclosure of additional companies that the authors received research support, consulted, or served on speaker's bureaus. A total of 134 patents had been awarded (Maximum = 18/author) to textbook authors. Relative to DiPiro's Pharmacotherapy: A Pathophysiologic Approach, contributors to Goodman and Gilman's Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics and Katzung's Basic and Clinical Pharmacology were more frequently patent holders (OR = 6.45, P < .0005). Female authors were less likely than males to have > 1 patent (OR = 0.15, P < .0005). A total of $2,411,080 USD (28.3% for speaking, 27.0% for consulting, and 23.9% for research), was received by 53 authors (Range = $299 to $310,000/author). Highly compensated authors were from multiple fields including oncology, psychiatry, neurology, and urology. The maximum number of additional companies, not currently indexed in the Dollars for Docs database, for which an author had potential CoIs was 73.
conclusionsFinancial CoIs are common among the authors of pharmacology and pharmacotherapy textbooks. Full transparency of potential CoIs, particularly patents, should become standard procedure for future editions of educational materials in pharmacology.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.