Physician, Reveal Thyself

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Weinfurt says that going in, he predicted the papers would at least disclose who funded the overall research, because most journals started requiring that information long before they started asking individual authors to reveal their personal connections to industry. "We were surprised that 72% [of papers] did not identify the source of their support," he says. "We'd like to know who funded those studies."

BusinessWeek contacted all five companies. A spokesperson for Bristol-Myers Squibb said in an e-mail that the company has an official policy stating, "Any BMS funding or involvement in a publication must be disclosed in the publication." A spokesperson for Boston Scientific sent this statement: "Boston Scientific requires disclosure of our involvement as a sponsor in any publication or presentation relating to a clinical study or its results. The manner in which an author reports that involvement to an academic journal to comply with the journal's author financial disclosure requirements remains the responsibility of each author." The other companies had not responded as of publication time.

What About the Disclosure System?

Some journal editors gripe that there is only so much they can do. Once they issue disclosure rules, they have no choice but to trust authors to follow them. "I'm not a cop. I'm not the FBI," says Dr. Catherine DeAngelis, editor in chief of JAMA and a longtime advocate of disclosure. With several thousand authors contributing every year to her publication, DeAngelis says, she can't expect her editors to Google (GOOG) every disclosure to try to determine whether it's accurate. And she's frustrated so many authors are resisting the call to disclose.

"It should be a no-brainer," DeAngelis says. "It doesn't mean the worthiness of the paper is marred. But if they're not disclosing because they think it's marred, then maybe it is."

Underlying the disclosure debate is a larger question: What good does transparency do anyway? If everyone was disclosing consistently, the world would be awash in information that could be hard to decipher. Most disclosures are simply lists of companies: They don't say how much money the authors receive from those companies, whether they're paid in cash and/or stock, or what services they provide in return.

"The whole system is pretty slipshod," says Dr. Jerome Kassirer, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and author of On the Take: How Medicine's Complicity with Big Business Can Endanger Your Health. "When you're reading an article and you know an author has a conflict of interest, you're still in the dark."

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Weintraub is a senior writer for BusinessWeek's science and technology department.