Most scientific publishers require authors to submit their manuscripts with a text
reporting their own parallel activities, including patent-related ones, that may be
considered as potential Conflict-of-Interest (COI). The authors’ or institutional patenting
activities disclosed as COI in the official version of the article within Conflict-of-Interest
Statements (COIS) are generally analysed in the literature using either very focused or
non-systematic approaches. This study proposes methods for assessing COIS
presence and main features, particularly with respect to patent information, across
biomedical topics and journals that are covered in the PubMed database for the period
2011-2022. However, when comparing the results of equivalent COI-specific searches
within PubMed and a selection of journals’ websites for a specific topic (such as
COVID-19), COIS still appears unevenly available and searchable in PubMed due to
the practices that each publisher or preprint server applies across journals and over
time. Thus, if COIS appear an underestimated and/or incompletely evaluated source of
patent, the search and analysis of COI-specific disclosures require well-designed
strategies for efficiently identifying relevant information and then correctly assessing
technological and publishing trends or the effects of innovation policies.