A journalist in Washington, D.C. prompted a correction in both Nature and the New York Times after finding that the lead author of a paper on fish farming failed to disclose financial ties to one of the world’s largest aquaculture companies.
The article, “A 20-year retrospective review of global aquaculture,” found that the practice of fish farming has become significantly more friendly to the environment than it was two decades ago.
The paper caught the attention of the New York Times, which wrote about the findings. It also grabbed the attention of Tim Schwab, who noticed something a bit, well, fishy, about the study.
Schwab, a reporter who has covered conflicts of interest in corporate-sponsored research and has recently turned his attention to the Gates Foundation, saw that the lead author of the paper, Rosamond Naylor, of Stanford University, had failed to note her connections to Cargill — a major player in the global aquaculture industry and the biggest private company in the world (by revenue).
Schwab contacted the Times, which updated its article a day after publication to alert readers to the missing disclosure. Nature eventually followed suit, issuing the following correction on April 26, more than a month after Naylor’s paper first appeared (Naylor is “R.L.N.”):
This Article should have included the following competing interests statement: ‘R.L.N. is a member of the Forest Protection Advisory Panel at Cargill, and the Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE) has received funding from the Cargill Foundation for visiting scholars and staff support (but not for research). There has been no overlap between Cargill and research activities relating to aquaculture at the FSE’. The original Article has been corrected online.
Schwab told us that:
something seems very, very wrong with this very, very high-profile Nature study. If Nature’s editors and peer reviewers had clear disclosures from the authors when they submitted, would they have published the study? Would they have even reviewed it?
Would 24,000 readers have accessed it? Would the NYT (and several other news outlets) have covered it?
He also noted that at least three of Naylor’s co-authors on the paper appear to have had potentially disclosable ties to the aquaculture industry or related groups, which he raised with the journal. But Nature, so far, at least, hasn’t acted on those.
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