Original publishing date: Jun 11, 2010. Original Title: Of Affiliations and Conflicts...
Recently, through an unrelated chain of events, I came across the author guidelines (PDF) for the international journal of general medicine, The Lancet.
All of you are, of course, aware that The Lancet is a high impact factor journal with significant global readership of both of its off-line and online versions. The journal - no stranger to controversy - has come under severe criticism from the medical and scientific community, ever since it published the Wakefield article on Autism and the MMR vaccine in 1998. The conclusions and interpretation of this study were retracted by ten of the co-authors in 2004 (Murch et al., Lancet 363 (9411): 750), and the editor, Richard Horton, went on to explain that the retraction was due to "...revelations about conflicts of interests" (reported on The Beeb here). Wakefield was found to have been paid a large sum of money by lawyers trying to prove that the MMR vaccine was unsafe, and he did not declare this clear conflict of interest. The rest, as they say, is history. I needn't elaborate; you are aware of how Wakefield was censured for this non-disclosure, as well as for scientific and ethical misconducts.
