Association between institutional affiliations of academic editors and authors in medical journals

Abstract Background Most of the literature on conflict of interest (COI) has not focused on the role of academic editors and their possible COIs, although academic editors often hold senior faculty positions at universities, which might be considered a COI if this influences towards a more favourable processing to articles submitted by institutional colleagues. The current study aims to assess whether academic editor affiliation, a potential COI, can influence academic institution ranking as top contributor in the biomedical field. Methods We conducted a cross-sectional analysis extracting publicly available data from the 2019 Clarivate InCites Journal Citation Reports for journals in the “Medicine, General & Internal” category and from each journal website. We constructed the following study outcomes: i) being a top 5 academic contributor for the peer-review journal of interest (yes/no), ii) being a top 10 academic contributor for the peer-review journal of interest (yes/no), and iii) ranking position as top 50 academic contributor for the peer-review journal of interest. Mixed-effect linear and logistic regression models were employed, as appropriate. Results We included 114 journals in our analysis, 49% were open-access only. Sharing same affiliation of any of the editorial board members was associated with a 6.7 and 5.6 greater likelihood of being top 5 and top 10 contributors, respectively (95%CI 5.07-8.73 and 4.34-7.22). Similarly, sharing same affiliation was associated with being 12.1 places higher as top contributor (95%CI 10.35-13.81). When considering the editor in chief affiliation solely, association was even stronger. Conclusions We found that academic editors sharing the same institutional affiliation with authors was strongly associated with the likelihood of that institution of being a top contributor. Shared institutional affiliations between editors and authors should be clearly stated as part of an open and transparent peer-review process. Key messages • Editors sharing same affiliation with authors was strongly associated with the likelihood for the institution the editor was affiliated with of being top contributor for academic medical journals. • Shared institutional affiliations between editors and authors should be clearly stated as part of an open and transparent peer-review process.


Background:
Most of the literature on conflict of interest (COI) has not focused on the role of academic editors and their possible COIs, although academic editors often hold senior faculty positions at universities, which might be considered a COI if this influences towards a more favourable processing to articles submitted by institutional colleagues. The current study aims to assess whether academic editor affiliation, a potential COI, can influence academic institution ranking as top contributor in the biomedical field.

Methods:
We conducted a cross-sectional analysis extracting publicly available data from the 2019 Clarivate InCites Journal Citation Reports for journals in the ''Medicine, General & Internal'' category and from each journal website. We constructed the following study outcomes: i) being a top 5 academic contributor for the peer-review journal of interest (yes/no), ii) being a top 10 academic contributor for the peer-review journal of interest (yes/no), and iii) ranking position as top 50 academic contributor for the peer-review journal of interest. Mixed-effect linear and logistic regression models were employed, as appropriate.

Results:
We included 114 journals in our analysis, 49% were openaccess only. Sharing same affiliation of any of the editorial board members was associated with a 6.7 and 5.6 greater likelihood of being top 5 and top 10 contributors, respectively (95%CI 5. 07-8.73 and 4.34-7.22). Similarly, sharing same affiliation was associated with being 12.1 places higher as top contributor (95%CI 10.35-13.81). When considering the editor in chief affiliation solely, association was even stronger.

Conclusions:
We found that academic editors sharing the same institutional affiliation with authors was strongly associated with the likelihood of that institution of being a top contributor. Shared institutional affiliations between editors and authors should be clearly stated as part of an open and transparent peer-review process. Key messages: Editors sharing same affiliation with authors was strongly associated with the likelihood for the institution the editor was affiliated with of being top contributor for academic medical journals. Shared institutional affiliations between editors and authors should be clearly stated as part of an open and transparent peer-review process. What population health researchers' need? The population health research community has a vast experience in the reuse of data for health monitoring and surveillance or healthcare performance assessment. However, there is a gap in the extensive reuse of individual sensitive data, particularly when mobilising these data requires the linkage of multiple data sources curated in different sites. The gap is greater when it comes to using sensitive data in cross-national research. The usual arguments to explain the scarce extensive and continuous mobilisation of sensitive data are data privacy and safety issues, the difficulty to discover data sources of value, complex accessing rules, uneven data quality (particularly, nonharmonized data), and limited capacity (personnel and dedicated resources). In InfAct Joint Action, Information for Action, we demonstrated at a very small scale that mobilising individual sensitive data is possible, it is compliant with the legal and ethical requirements, and it yields the expected outputs. The instrument used for such an achievement was the design, implementation and deployment of a very small-scale federated infrastructure, where we could pilot all the legal, organisational, data quality and technological issues related to the mobilisation of individual sensitive data. (https://doi.org/ 10.1186/s13690-021-00731-z). Building on those achievements In PHIRI (see here https://www.phiri.eu/wp7) we are paving the way for a large-scale research infrastructure where multiple population health researchers with multiple research questions will need the mobilisation of multiple data sources from multiple sites across Europe. The PHIRI enhanced infrastructure will have to be prepared to provide a variety of services for data discovery, data access, data analysis and research outputs FAIR publication, while improving the capacity of population health researchers community in the use of advanced computing tools. In this workshop we will start describing the PHIRI federated research infrastructure achievements, the governance step-wise approach and the technological solutions provided. The workshop will discuss how an enhanced PHIRI could improve its services for the community of population health researchers; in particular improving the analytical capacity and the associated technological solutions. Finally, the workshop will touch ground on the future developments, in particular, the interaction of the PHIRI infrastructure with existen European-wide services providers, as EGI, and research infrastructures.

Key messages:
In the domain of population health sciences, the reuse of individual sensitive data for research purposes is very limited.
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