If an article contained a statement describing an author's financial interests (including a declaration of no interests), we considered a disclosure statement to be present.
Of these author instances, 220 (4.7%) had a disclosure, 577 (12.4%) had a declaration of no interests, and 3867 (82.9%) had no disclosure statement (Table 2).
Thus, for each author, we estimated the proportion of all unique pairwise article comparisons that agreed in terms of the presence of a financial disclosure, a declaration of no interests, or an absence of any disclosure statement.
For example, consider an author of 4 articles with the following disclosures: article 1 (relationship with a company), article 2 (relationship with a company), article 3 (declaration of no interests), article 4 (no disclosure statement).
In comparisons between articles by the same author, the types of disagreement were as follows: no disclosure statements vs declarations of no interests (64%); specific disclosures vs no disclosure statements (34%); and specific disclosures vs declarations of no interests (2%).
Eighty-three percent of the articles did not contain disclosure statements for any author (including declarations of no interests).
In an informal Internet search on authors in our database for whom no interests were disclosed and for whom there were explicit declarations of no interests, we found evidence that some authors had relationships that many would consider to be conflicts of interest.
The most frequent cases of disagreement (840/1317 [63.8%]) occurred when one article contained a declaration of no financial interests and another article by the same author contained no statement.
I did not vote on this report, because I forgot to make a declaration of interest – of financial interest, no less.
Finally, we are disappointed with Manton's comment regarding our declaration of no competing financial interests.
