Do journal editors have the responsibility to ensure authors are disclosing relevant conflicts of interest?
According to the editor of one Elsevier journal, the answer is “no.”
The case marks the second time this year that the editor of an Elsevier journal has been less than dogged about enforcing the company’s clearly stated policies about undisclosed conflicts.
The article in question now, “Lianhuaqingwen exerts anti-viral and anti-inflammatory activity against novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2),” appeared in Pharmacological Research and was written by a group with significant links to Shijiazhuang Yiling Pharmaceutical, which makes traditional Chinese remedies. However, those links were not disclosed in the article, which has been cited 225 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science, making it a “highly cited paper.”
And in December 2020, Pharmacological Research named the article one of the best publications on traditional Chinese medicine to appear in the journal in 2019 and 2020.
The researchers — including Zhenhua Jia and Nanshan Zhong — seem to have a habit of publishing papers on lianhuaqingwen that neglect to make clear their connection with the company.
Zhong is a major figure in Chinese science. As we reported in May about an earlier article in Phytomedicine, another Elsevier title, with the same problem:
Zhong first rose to prominence during the 2003 SARS outbreak for developing “a controversial steroid treatment that cured many SARS patients but left some with debilitating bone issues,” according to NPR. In 2020, TIME named him to the magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people. He was appointed to lead China’s National Health Commission investigation into COVID-19 early last year, and in February 2020 Harvard announced that Zhong would share in a $115 million effort with university scientists to develop therapies for COVID-19.
We also reported that:
last year an anonymous whistleblower found documents financially tying Zhong and Jia to Shijiazhuang Yiling Pharmaceutical, which supplied the Lianhuaqingwen capsules for the study and applied for and sponsored the trial, according to China’s clinical trial database. That detail was not disclosed in the paper.
Jia has another connection to the company: He is married to the pharmaceutical company’s director and secretary of the board of directors, Rui Wu, according to a public stock incentive plan that the company issued in March 2013. Rui Wu also is the daughter of Yi-ling Wu, the Chinese billionaire who founded the company.
Earlier this year, a researcher in China contacted the editor of the journal, Emilio Clementi, about missing disclosures — sharing our coverage of the Phytomedicine paper — and other concerns about the article. In an email shared with us, Clementi not only seems untroubled by the missing disclosures, but he declares that policing conflicts of interest is beyond his authority as an editor:
we conducted a careful examination of the scientific validity of the paper, which has involved also two independent reviewers different from the ones who saw the article during the initial review process. We confirm the scientific validity of the findings. As for the issue about the Conflict of Interest: as you may understand, it is entirely in the responsibility of the authors to disclose them and we cannot force them to do so
No further actions should be expected from our side
That disavowal doesn’t jibe with Elsevier’s stated policy about conflicts of interest, which makes clear that editors do indeed have the power to adjudicate cases in which authors have failed to adequately disclose such ties.
Clementi did not respond to a request for comment. Nor did Thomas Efferth, the editor of Phytomedicine. As we reported in the spring, Efferth had requested a draft erratum for the article he’d published but has failed to issue the notice.
Elsevier has not responded to a request for comment.
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“His wife is married to the pharmaceutical company’s director and secretary of the board of directors, Rui Wu, ..”
I would have thought his wife would have been married to HIM. Have I misunderstood or is there something that needs to be fixed??
Fixed — thanks.
“His wife is married to”: either polygamy is a thing in China, or there is an issue with this sentence 🙂
Fixed — thanks.
I don’t see this Clementi person listed as an Editor on journal website, but taken on the face value their statement is blatantly wrong. “They” didn’t “confirm scientific validity of the study” via review process. That would require a replication study. Review process is a little more than a flea check for blatant technical errors, logical fallacies, and data manipulation. The basis of peer-review is the implicit assumption that authors are fundamentally honest in describing their work. Lack of disclosure of conflict of interest is a violation of this implied honesty.
Vladimir, see https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/pharmacological-research/about/editorial-board – Clementi is the Editor-in-Chief
“Sir, why is your journal full of crappy papers?”
“Hey, we didn’t write them, the authors did.”
Declaring “no conflicts of interest” is supposed to be a mark of credibility, similar to declaring that one has a prestigious university degree. The “no conflicts of interest” mark is not a guarantee of good scholarship, much as the prestigious university degree isn’t a guarantee either. But it provides some prima facie evidence of good scholarship, or at least prima facie evidence that certain hazards are absent.
Though it is not a substitute for analyzing the article’s specific evidence, it is a heuristic that helps the reader know how seriously to take the article.
To *falsely* declare “no conflicts of interest” robs the mark of its heuristic value, and intentionally misleads the reader. Indeed, such a false declaration is evidence of untrustworthiness, and hence is even *more* serious a red flag than is a simple honest acknowledgment of having a conflict of interest. I suggest this is similar to fraudulently claiming to have a university degree that one doesn’t have, in at least some ways.
It seems to me that a scientist’s intentional failure to disclose a conflict of interest (at least in instances where the criteria and applicability thereof are very clear, as opposed to vague or debatable) should be considered a kind of fraud.
It is not merely an omission, but rather it is a false statement that “there are no conflicts of interest.”
I don’t see why this kind of deception should be immune from the consequences of other similar fraud. It ought to be considered shameful and reputationally damaging for many years for the scientist who is caught engaging in it.
Just as journals are not responsible for checking the data from the authors, they are not responsible for checking the conflicts of interest. Journals do not have the means to hunt this information down. They need to rely on the honesty and good faith of the authors that their data are real and that they truthfully reported their conflicts of interest.
Do journal editors have the responsibility to punish authors when it has been revealed that the reported conflicts of interest were fraudulent? They sure are, just as if the data were found to be fraudulent. At the absolute least, there should be an erratum which updates the conflicts of interest. If the fraudulence is egregious, such in this case, then retraction should be on the table. But to say that they have no responsibility after they have been made aware of the fraudulence is disgraceful. The “validity” of the work is irrelevant. We only know what the authors report, and we don’t know how that might have been impacted by their conflicts of interest.
‘We cannot force authors to disclose conflicts of interest’ True enough dear editor, but you can unpublish their paper.
Nanshan Zhong is also a member of the Communist Party of China (this information is easy to find in Chinese but not on English). Would this type of information be necessary to disclose as well?