Do scholarly publications have to state who funded their research?

May 2, 2013 11:25 AM

Is there somewhere in the article where they're required to state who backed the scientific study financially?
posted by film to Education (10 answers total)

Most medical and science journals do this. Look at the end of an article and you should see an acknowledgement section where it will state if it was funded by a company. In addition,authors now list conflicts of interest (i.e. speaker bureau for company X, funding from company X, etc).

Sometimes the information is online and not on the actual downloaded PDF (article).

If for some reason you can't access articles and see what this looks like, memail me and I can send you some.
posted by Wolfster at 11:39 AM on May 2, 2013

I suppose this might be part of the author's arrangement with the publication, as Wolfster points out, or with the funding entity.

Are you looking for some kind of legal requirement? With penalties for noncompliance? I can't think how such a law could exist in the US.
posted by JimN2TAW at 11:53 AM on May 2, 2013

It's going to depend on the funding source, and on the particular journal doing the publishing. Seems like most federal funding (at least most that I come across in my line of work) does include this information.

To follow up on what Wolfster said, part of my job involves deciding how to deal with conflicts of interest in academic research. More often than not, if my office decides that there is a conflict of interest, we require the researchers to disclose that to the journals during the publication process. The journals then decide whether to disclose that information in the article itself. At some point I would really like to take on a little side project of tracking down these decisions once the research has actually been done and published, to see how often the journals actually do decide to publish that information.
posted by Stacey at 11:53 AM on May 2, 2013

I got a travel grant from an institution where I did some primary research, and then published an article where I used some of that research. The funding institution did not ask me to include their name in the publication, and the publisher did not ask me to identify who funded my research.

I was in the humanities.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 12:43 PM on May 2, 2013

I am involved in medical research and would say that more often than not this information is required and disclosed in some way. One primary reason is to reveal any financial or other relationship that would potentially bias the outcome of the research (e.g., a drug company funding research that evaluates the efficacy of a new drug). All conferences I attend require this of poster presenters or speakers and my home institution requires us to disclose biases and funding as part of our talk with standard slides provided to do so. Similarly most research publications require you to disclose your funding sources. Here it's to be transparant about potential biases also, but there are also new requirements to provide public access to research outcomes that were federally funded in the US. In other words, if a federal entity funded your work in any way, you and the publications that share your work are required to ensure that it is also available to the public at large. In this case, the journal would need your funding information to ensure that they are making papers available as required.
posted by goggie at 1:15 PM on May 2, 2013

For university-sponsored research, I believe academic institutional research boards sometimes have regulations over disclosures of conflicts of interest in publications that have the university's affiliation listed. Much of this research is also federally funded so the regulations that those agencies have would also apply.
posted by epanalepsis at 1:27 PM on May 2, 2013

In medicine a lot of articles include funding information but a lot don't. Here's a 2010 article about disclosure of funding sources in human-subject AIDS research in the developing world.
posted by mskyle at 1:36 PM on May 2, 2013

I work in scientific publishing. Our journals specifically require that authors disclose any conflicts of interest. Additionally, authors generally include funding information in their acknowledgments, as noted by others above. It's been my impression that some funding bodies (although not necessarily all) have requirements for acknowledging their support, but we as the publisher don't specifically require it, to my knowledge.
posted by cellar door at 2:43 PM on May 2, 2013

There is not a convention per se requiring disclosure, as there would be say, for the author(s) to include an abstract. Many journals do specifically require a statement of any conflicts of interest, but that is technically not a requirement to spell out funding sources (unless the source is a conflict of course). If you are interested in an article from a particular journal, most journals' websites have a link that spells out something like "Info for Authors" or "Guidelines for Submission" where you could find whether or not there is a requirement and what the requirement is exactly.

I think many people in my field (bio/medical) automatically put things like grant funding (i.e., a grant number) in the Acknowledgments section. You could also email the contact author (the one whose email is given in the paper) and just ask them straight out....many will answer you and some won't.....
posted by Tandem Affinity at 7:02 PM on May 2, 2013

In addition to what others have mentioned (publisher requirements regarding [apparent] conflicts of interest, funding body requirements of mention) there's also an element to which it's just the Done Thing.
posted by PMdixon at 9:38 AM on May 3, 2013