What counts as a conflict of interest: reply to criticisms made by Frenk & Dar
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dr Shiffman is engaged as a consultant and Senior Scientific Advisor to Pinney Associates, a health policy, pharmaceutical development, and tobacco control consultancy. Pinney Associates consults on tobacco control and smoking cessation exclusively to GlaxoSmithKline, which markets smoking cessation products. Dr Shiffman also now has an interest in JSR, LLC, which develops novel pharmaceutical products, including smoking cessation products. Dr Shiffman has received research funding from GlaxoSmithKline (through its predecessors SmithKline Beecham Consumer Healthcare, Marrion Merrell-Dow and GlaxoWellcome). He has also received research funding from the following US government research institutes, all parts of the National Institutes of Health: the National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Cancer Institute, National Institute on Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, National Institute for Nursing Research, National Institute of Mental Health and National Institute of Diabetes, Digestive and Kidney Diseases. He has also received research funding from the following private non-profit non-governmental organizations concerned with public health: the American Heart Association, American Cancer Society and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and from the following governmental organizations concerned with health: the State of California Tobacco Related Disease Research Program and the Veterans Administration Special Action Office on Drug Abuse Prevention. Dr Shiffman has also consulted to and/or received honoraria from the following pharmaceutical or other companies who have evaluated or currently market products and/or services for smoking and/or other conditions, or who represent such companies: AB Leo (now Pharmacia), American Pharmaceutical Association, Bayer Pharmaceuticals, Ciba-Geigy (now Novartis), Consumer Healthcare Products Association, Cygnus, Key Pharmaceuticals, HealthScan, Healthwise, Lifesign, Medco Medical Management, Medical Communications, Parke-Davis, Porter/Novelli and Procter & Gamble. He has also acted as a consultant for the following non-profit non-governmental health organizations: American Heart Association, American Lung Association, American Society of Addiction Medicine, Center for the Advancement of Health, Palo Alto Center for Disease Prevention and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. He has consulted to the following academic publishers: Academic Press, Oxford University Press and Sage Press, and the following academic institutions: Hahnemann University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Pennsylvania State University, University of Minnesota, University of Kentucky, University of California, University of Vermont and West Virginia University. Dr Shiffman has consulted additionally to the following government bodies: Health Canada (Canadian Health Ministry) and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Ten years ago, Dr Shiffman was engaged as an expert witness in litigation against a tobacco company (law firms: Budd, Larner & Associates and Wilentz & Associates), and since the publications under discussion, he has again been so engaged (by the law firm of Ness Motley et al.). Dr Shiffman also now has an interest in invivodata, Inc., which provides electronic diary methodology for clinical research. His university retirement mutual funds' stock holdings include Philip Morris and Microsoft, Inc. Sir—If I understand them correctly, Frenk & Dar are arguing that I am failing to live up to my own standards by declaring a drug company as the funding source for a clinical trial but not stating that the company manufactured the products being tested! While the example they chose is perhaps a little weak, the issue of what counts as a declaration is interesting and worth considering. It seems to me that a general principle would be that the declaration should provide the kind of reader who would be expected to read the piece with information relating to any potential bias, whether intentional or unintentional, and the name of a direct sponsoring organization may not be enough to do that.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.022 | 0.156 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.068 | 0.073 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.016 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".