ArticleJournal of general internal medicine2018
What Does 'Unpaid Consultant' Signify? A Survey of Euphemistic Language in Conflict of Interest Declarations.
Article in Journal of general internal medicine, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 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
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Status, Respect, and Stigma: A Qualitative Study of Non-financial Interests in Medicine.Journal of bioethical inquiry · 2020Article
- Conflict of interest disclosure: striking a balance?The European journal of health economics : HEPAC : health economics in prevention and care · 2019Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
BACKGROUND AND
objectiveInadequate competing interest declarations present interpretive challenges for editors, reviewers, and readers. We systematically studied a common euphemism, 'unpaid consultant,' to determine its occurrence in declarations and its association with vested interests, authors, and journals.
methodsWe used Google Scholar, a search engine that routinely includes disclosures, to identify 1164 occurrences and 787 unique biomedical journal publications between 1994 and 2014 that included one or more authors declaring themselves as an "unpaid consultant." Changes over time were reckoned with absolute and relative yearly rates, the latter normalized by overall biomedical publication volumes. We further analyzed declarations according to author, consultancy recipient, and journal.
resultsWe demonstrate increases in the use of "unpaid consultant" since 2004 and show that such uninformative declarations are overwhelmingly (801/865, 92.6%) associated with for-profit companies and other vested interests, most notably in the pharmaceutical, device, and biotech industries.
conclusionsDisclosing 'unpaid' relationships with for-profit companies typically signals but does not explain competing interests. Our findings challenge editors to respond to the increasing use of language that may conceal rather than illuminate conflicts of interest.
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.