Conflict of interest reporting in biomedical journals published in China

This study aimed to investigate the current status and policy of Conflict of interest (COI) reporting in biomedical journals in China. Thirty Chinese-language medical journals and 37 English-language biomedical journals indexed by Journal Citation Reports categories were included into this study. These 67 journals were all published in China. All articles published in the most recent two issues were checked for identifying the disclosure statement in the text or not. Twenty-one of 30 (70%) Chinese-language journals required a disclosure of author’s potential COI. No journals require editors or referees to disclose the conflicts of interest to the readers. In total, 1,212 publications in Chinese-language were evaluated. Only two journals reported COI in their publications. For the 37 English-language journals, 32 (86.5%) required author’s potential COI disclosure, and four of them required only research articles or original articles to disclose COI. A total of 1,170 publications were evaluated. Among them, 50% editorials, 79.3% review articles, and 73.6% original articles reported presence or absence of COI. In our studied journals, the percentage of the policies requiring author COI disclosure is still low. Biomedical journals published in China should enforce COI disclosure policies to authors, editors, and referees.