Researchers required to show money trail. (Environmental Intelligence).

In an effort to curtail corporate influence over medical and scientific studies, a number of prominent journals have adopted a new policy requiring authors to reveal any "competing financial interests" that may influence their research. The journals Nature, the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, and the Journal of the American Medical Association jointly issued guidelines on 1 October 2001 that aim to inform readers about the financial relationships between scientists, academic research institutions, and private research groups and corporations.

Under the new rules, researchers are required to submit sources of funding, records of employment, and histories of financial investments when a journal accepts their work for publication. Authors can elect to forego disclosing this information, but that decision is noted to readers.

Several recent incidents in which scientists have been pressured to alter or cover up the results of clinical trials have brought into question the integrity of industry-funded research. For instance, last year the California-based Immune Response Corporation threatened legal action against hired researchers James Kahn of the University of San Francisco and Stephen Lagakos of the Harvard School of Public Health. The company demanded $7-10 million in damages upon learning that results revealing the ineffectiveness of its AIDS drug were to be published. Dr. Thomas Bodenheimer of the University of California San Francisco Medical Center analyzed 70 studies on the safety of a heart drug and found a significant distinction between findings: 96 percent of researchers with ties to pharmaceutical companies found the drug safe, while only 36 percent of those without industry connections found the medication safe.

Industry influence over biomedical research has grown significantly in recent years. According to Philip Campbell, editor of Nature, the new policies will help prevent "circumstances where selection of evidence, interpretation of results or emphasis of presentation might be inadvertently or even deliberately biased by a researcher's other interests."