Integrity of science is in jeopardy

From New Scientist Print Edition

Asking researchers to declare conflicts of interest that might prejudice their work is not enough to safeguard the integrity of science, says Catherine DeAngelis, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Universities should do more to investigate staff who don't disclose relevant financial ties, she says.

JAMA and The New England Journal of Medicine both require authors to disclose links that could influence a study. Yet several researchers have failed to do so in work published in JAMA this year. In one case, when JAMA rejected a study because the authors refused to obtain an independent analysis of the data, the work was simply published in a different journal.

Even when researchers declare financial ties, readers still don't know how much the conflict has skewed the results, says Daylian Cain, a moral psychologist at Harvard University. Disclosure could even tempt researchers to exaggerate findings, in order to counter anticipated scepticism from readers, he says.

This problem made news earlier this year in regards to the financial interests of drug companies, and how sponsored research items always were more favorable for the interests of these same companies.

Of course, we hardly think of psychiatry as a real science, because of this, and other far more serious issues. When a disease is correctly identified, it usually isn't psychiatry any more.