Abstract

LUNA, Carlos M; JOLLY, Enrique C; BEVILACQUA, Carlos  and  JAGER, Nina. Conflicto de Intereses Editoriales. Rev. amer. med. respiratoria [online]. 2011, vol.11, n.3, pp.134-140. ISSN 1852-236X.

Conflict of interest (COI) exists when judgment regarding some specific issue and integrity of its act are unduly influenced by a secondary competing interest, professional, economic or personal, even if they do not affect such judgment. Medical journals must take care for the reader's trust regarding the review process and for the credibility of articles by investigating about COIs while writing, reviewing or deciding about the publication of an article. Authors, reviewers and editors could have direct or indirect financial or other competing interests. COIs are ubiquitous and cannot be eliminated altogether. However, they can be managed constructively. Journals need to be specific about their definition of COI, including its standards on expiry, the steps that editors will take if competing interests surface from other sources, and the reasons for not to consider a manuscript any further. They need also to publish the disclosure of relevant COIs. Clinical practice guidelines published by scientific societies are written by opinion leaders. Those professional societies perceive it is necessary to avoid COIs for delicate issues as recommending therapies, and this generates difficulties in the guidelines' writing, as the experts have usually financial COIs and this leads to exclusion of such leaders from authorship. The Revista Americana de Medicina Respiratoria asks authors and reviewers to disclose their COIs, but they never do it completely. Consequently, the editors decided, when trying to revert this universal trend to no-declaration, to create a brief questionnaire designed to define and manage more precisely the COIs.

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