New Form Designed to Help Medical Journals Avoid Conflicts of Interest

By News Staff
Posted: 11/23/2009, 5:20 p.m.

The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, or ICMJE, is testing a new uniform disclosure form (5-page PDF; About PDFs) for reporting potential conflicts of interest among authors.

The 14 journals that are ICMJE members, including the Annals of Internal Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and the New England Journal of Medicine, have adopted the form. Jay Siwek, M.D., of Washington, D.C., editor of American Family Physician, said the AAFP's peer-reviewed journal will be adopting a slightly modified version of the ICMJE form.

The ICMJE introduced the new form in an October 2009 editorial (2-page PDF; About PDFs) in its member journals. Authors of articles published in biomedical journals are asked to disclose four types of information:

their associations with commercial entities that provided support for the work described in the submitted manuscript;
their associations with commercial entities that could be viewed as having an interest in the work;
similar financial associations involving their spouse or partner or their children under 18 years old; and
nonfinancial associations that may be relevant to the manuscript, which may be personal, professional, political, institutional or religious.

"Our goal is to make the process of disclosure uniform and easy. The new form should eliminate the need to reformat disclosure information for specific journals," the editorial said. "By adopting a uniform format, we hope to make the process of disclosure of competing interests easier for authors and less confusing for readers."

The ICMJE will test the new form until April 10, 2010, and would like feedback.