Earth science wrestles with conflict-of-interest policies

The Emerging Field of Geoethics

“…Their careers are often certified and evaluated on the basis of the number and quality of publications they produce. Personal ambitions may collide with increasing competition between professional groups, which can lead to unethical behavior (Mayer 2015) or conflicts of interest Tollefson 2015).…”

Scientific integrity issues in Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry: Improving research reproducibility, credibility, and transparency

“…Generally, the concern over conflicting or competing interests in science is that secondary interests such as financial gain or maintaining professional relationships compromise the primary interest of upholding scientific norms such as reporting data accurately and completely, interpreting data appropriately, and acknowledging value judgments or interpretive assumptions (Elliott ). Conflict of interest policies may be better developed in the biomedical fields than in the applied environmental sciences because the former often involves human participants, and because of the strong financial ties between academia and the pharmaceutical industry (Tollefson ). For instance, if a research team is reporting on the efficacy of a medical device or a drug and they or their employers hold a patent or stand to gain financially from a positive report, then they clearly have a financial conflict of interest (Figure ).…”

“…The mere existence of a potential conflict of interest should not alone throw results in doubt when it is disclosed and acknowledged appropriately. However, although most articles in the environmental sciences routinely disclose funding sources that could be perceived as potential conflicts of interest, major omissions have occurred (Oreskes et al ; Ruff ; Tollefson ; Krimsky and Gillam ; McClellan ). For instance, the findings of a study on risks of contamination from natural gas extraction from hydraulic fracturing of bedrock were undermined when it came out (apparently unbeknownst to the university) that the research supervisor was being paid 3 times his university salary by serving as an advisor to an oil and gas company invested in the practice.…”

“…One does not have to search hard to find plenty of published concerns about the credibility of science. These include overstated and unreliable results (Ioannidis 2005;Harris and Sumpter 2015;Henderson and Thomson 2017), conflicts of interest (McGarity and Wagner 2008;Stokstad 2012;Boone et al 2014;Oreskes et al 2015;Tollefson 2015), profound bias (Atkinson and Macdonald 2010;Bes-Rastrollo et al 2014;Cormier 2015a, 2015b), suppression of results to protect financial interests (Wadman 1997;Wise 1997), deliberate misinformation campaigns as a public relations strategy for financial or ideological aims (Baba et al 2005;McGarity and Wagner 2008;Gleick and 252 coauthors 2010;Oreskes and Conway 2011), political interference with or suppression of results from government scientists (Hutchings 1997;Stedeford 2007;Ogden 2016), self-promotion and sabotage of rivals in hypercompetitive settings (Martinson et al 2005;Edwards and Roy 2016;Ross 2017), publication bias, peer review and authorship games (Young et al 2008;Fanelli 2012;Callaway 2015;), selective reporting of data or adjusting the questions to fit the data (Fraser et al 2018), overhyped institutional press releases that are incommensurate with the actual science behind them (Cope and Allison 2009;Sumner et al 2014), dodgy journals (Bohannon 2013), and dodgy conferences (Van Noorden 2014).…”

‘Shooting the messenger’: some reflections on what happens doing science in the public arena

“…My disclosure issue led to an essay in ES & T by other earth scientists who argued that a more intensive disclosure system needs to be developed in the earth sciences to ferret out bias from industry‐funded research (Oreskes et al ., ). And also, there was a piece on the topic published in Nature (Tollefson, ).…”