“The team then looked through information from OpenAlex—an open-access catalog of scientific papers—and industry announcements to check for ties between authors and social media companies during the period when the journals required disclosure. They found about half of all papers had some such tie, suggesting authors in 30% of all studies were not declaring potential conflicts of interest. For the subset of papers that revealed the identity of the editors and peer reviewers, the authors also examined whether they, too, had any conflicts of interest. Adding those who did to the analysis pushed up the proportion of papers that had some industry tie to 66%. Extrapolating to cases where the reviewers were anonymous, the researchers estimated that only one in five papers were likely to have remained fully independent of industry throughout the publication process.”
