Conflict of interest and funding in health communication on social media: a systematic review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: To synthesise the available evidence on the reporting of conflicts of interest (COI) by individuals posting health messages on social media, and on the reporting of funding sources of studies cited in health messages on social media. DATA SOURCES: MEDLINE (OVID) (2005-March 2022), Embase (2005-March 2022) and Google Scholar (2005-August 2022), supplemented with a review of reference lists and forward citation tracking. DESIGN: Reviewers selected eligible studies and abstracted data in duplicate and independently. We appraised the quality of the included studies using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool. We summarised the results in both narrative and tabular formats. We followed the PRISMA 2020 checklist for reporting our study. RESULTS: Of a total of 16 645 retrieved citations, we included 17 eligible studies. The frequency of reporting of conflicts of interest varied between 0% and 60%, but it was mostly low. In addition, a significant proportion, ranging between 15% and 80%, of healthcare professionals using social media have financial relationships with industry. However, three studies assessed the proportion of conflicts of interest of physicians identified through Open Payment Database but not reported by the authors. It was found that 98.7-100% of these relationships with industry are not reported when communicating health-related information. Also, two studies showed that there is evidence of a potential association between COI and the content of posting. No data was found on the reporting of funding sources of studies cited in health messages on social media. CONCLUSIONS: While a significant proportion of healthcare professionals using social media have financial relationships with industry, lack of reporting on COI and undisclosed COI are common. We did not find studies on the reporting of funding sources of studies cited in health messages on social media. TRIAL REGISTRATION: dx.doi.org/10.17504/protocols.io.5jyl8jj4rg2w/v1.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.085 | 0.393 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.026 | 0.024 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".