Disclosure of Patenting Activities within Scientific Publications as Potential Conflict-of-Interests: Evidences from Biomedical Literature

Abstract

Abstract Most scientific publishers require authors to submit their manuscripts with a text reporting their own parallel activities, including patent-related ones, that may be considered as potential Conflict-of-Interest (COI). The authors’ or institutional patenting activities disclosed as COI in the official version of the article within Conflict-of-Interest Statements (COIS) are generally analysed in the literature using either very focused or non-systematic approaches. This study proposes methods for assessing COIS presence and main features, particularly with respect to patent information, across biomedical topics and journals that are covered in the PubMed database for the period 2011-2022. However, when comparing the results of equivalent COI-specific searches within PubMed and a selection of journals’ websites for a specific topic (such as COVID-19), COIS still appears unevenly available and searchable in PubMed due to the practices that each publisher or preprint server applies across journals and over time. Thus, if COIS appear an underestimated and/or incompletely evaluated source of patent, the search and analysis of COI-specific disclosures require well-designed strategies for efficiently identifying relevant information and then correctly assessing technological and publishing trends or the effects of innovation policies.

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