MIND THE CONFLICTS… OF INTEREST! SURVEY OF THREE PAEDIATRIC MEDICAL JOURNALS

Key words: Conflicts of interest, Paediatric medical journals, Disclosure, Survey

Conflicts of interest have often conditioned man’s behaviour since ancient times. In the medical field, the most evident aspect of such conflicts are the financial relations possibly connecting pharmaceutical industries to doctors. This circumstance may impair not only practitioners’ independence but also uprightness of scientific research and reliability of published trials. To avoid this, some leading general medical journals have recently taken a disclosure from the Authors of researches to declare explicitly whether a potential conflict of interest exist or not. In order to verify if a similar precaution is being taken also in the paediatric field, we have looked into all editorials, original works and letters published in the course of the last year in three scientific international paediatric journals.