In June, the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine retracted a fraudulent paper because:
"financial and intellectual input to the paper by outside parties was not disclosed."
Paul Thacker has an interesting article on financial-disclosure policies in scientific journals. Most journals do not require authors to make financial disclosure statements:
The editors of several environmental journals recently discovered that they had published papers by industry-funded researchers, yet had not disclosed the authors' financial backers. Officers of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and the American Meteorological Society say that they do not have disclosure policies but note that they will discuss new requirements at upcoming meetings. Similarly, leaders with the Society for Risk Analysis, the publisher of the journal Risk Analysis, tell ES&T that they now require authors to sign conflict-of-interest statements and that the society has set up a task force to examine the issue.
"Disclosure is important so that people know if the researcher or reviewer has financial or other interests with a stake in the research results," says ES&T's editor Jerry Schnoor. "Then, people can judge the findings in that light." Schnoor adds that ES&T is now strengthening its disclosure policy so that editors and readers will know who is funding studies.
Pat Michaels gets a mention:
A case in point is Pat Michaels, a professor of environmental science at the University of Virginia and the resident climate-change expert at the Cato Institute, a free-market think tank that receives money from ExxonMobil.
Last July, Michaels made headlines across the U.S. when ABC News and the Associated Press reported that Colorado-based Intermountain Rural Electric Assoc. (IREA) had paid Michaels more than $100,000. IREA is heavily invested in coal-burning power plants.
"We here at IREA believe that it is necessary to support the scientific community that is willing to stand up against the alarmists and bring a balance to the discussion," wrote Stanley Lewandowski, Jr., the group's general manager, in a July letter to other utilities.
While taking money from special interests, Michaels was also criticizing studies that linked climate change to more intense hurricanes. In May, he published a study in Geophysical Research Letters. And in December, he published a comment in the Journal of Climate with Chris Landsea of the National Hurricane Center and Chip Knappenberger of New Hope Environmental Services. Neither article listed Michaels' corporate sponsorship.
"There's a financial conflict, and it should be disclosed," says Don Kennedy, editor of the journal Science
More like this
Before anyone starts scientific papers sponsored by grants or contracts always mention the name of the sponsor and often the grant number.
Precisely what journal disclosure requirements accomplish is largely dependent upon what those requirements cover.
For example, if they are limited to "financial backing for the paper under consideration", I suspect they will not cover cases like that of Michaels.
That might require that an author disclose all his/her financial sources, something that may be difficult to prove -- to say nothing of enforce.
On a related note, of course, the "lead author" of a paper often has nothing much to do with a paper. If it's a typical academic paper, the lead author is the guy who brings in the money, and a bunch of juniors did the work and wrote the paper. If it's a drug trial paper, the lead author had nothing to do with it and the drug company did the work and wrote the paper.
Actually z the rainmaker is usually the LAST author (except in math which is always alphabetical). As far as disclosure, I think that you will find that the medical journals are the most exacting, and the places where the most nastiness goes on.
This article might interest you:
http://www.reason.com/rb/rb092206.shtml
scientific papers sponsored by grants or contracts always mention the name of the sponsor and often the grant number.
There is a difference between putting the name of the sponsor in the "acknowledgements" section- as is common practice- and filling out a section making clear what the conflicts of interest are. There are lots of eminent scientists, who receive personal funding (i.e. salary) from their sponsor- it is nearly ubiquitous in the US.
transparency is fine; but it seems that the rules should be applied equally to everyone.
yours
per
And essentially everyone at a university in Euorope receives all of their salary from the government. You had a point
"Actually z the rainmaker is usually the LAST author "
You're correct of course. I didn't know that about math journals though. Confirms my suspicions that they are all borderline autistic.