Tag: Research ethics

A conflict of interest isn’t proof you did something wrong. It’s anything that could make a reasonable reader wonder whether your results were shaped by something other than the data — funding, employment, a patent, a personal relationship. The rule of thumb worth repeating to a labmate: if you’d feel awkward explaining it to a reviewer, declare it. Declaring it costs you a sentence. Not declaring it, and having someone else spot it later, costs a lot more.

What actually counts as a conflict of interest

The clearest definition we’ve seen, and the one we use in Writing Tip 8, is this: a conflict of interest exists when the motivation of one of your roles infringes on the duties of another. A doctor who receives funding from a pharmaceutical company and then studies that company’s drug has two roles pulling in the same direction — clinician and paid consultant — and readers need to know that before they weigh the conclusions.

In practice, the categories that come up again and again in the papers we edit are:

• Funding. A grant, consultancy fee, or in-kind support from a company whose product or interests the paper touches on.
• Employment. Yours, or a close family member’s, at an organisation with a stake in the result.
• Intellectual property. A patent or pending patent connected to the method or material you’re reporting on.
• Roles that overlap. Sitting on an editorial board, advisory panel, or review committee connected to the submission.
• Personal relationships. A close collaborator, former student, or family member among the authors or reviewers.

None of these mean the research is compromised. They mean a reader deserves the chance to judge that for themselves — which is the entire point of the disclosure. As the tip puts it, a conflict of interest is “the potential for misconduct: a place where extra transparency can help build trust.”

The test: would it look odd if it came out later?

Researchers usually don’t struggle with the obvious cases — nobody forgets to mention that a pharmaceutical company funded a drug trial. Where it gets murky is the smaller stuff: a free sample from the manufacturer, a co-author who reviewed your grant application last year, a spouse who works for a competing lab. The test that cuts through this is simple: imagine a peer reviewer finding out about it independently, after the paper is published. If that would look bad, or even just surprising, it belongs in the disclosure — not because you did anything wrong, but because you didn’t get to decide that on the reader’s behalf.

This is also why editors and reviewers themselves have to manage conflicts of interest, not just authors. If you want to see how a journal’s peer-review process handles this from the other side, it’s worth watching alongside this post.

Find your journal’s actual policy — don’t guess

Here’s where we won’t tell you what to write, because it genuinely depends on where you’re submitting. Disclosure requirements vary by journal, publisher, and field, and they change — a journal that accepted a one-line “the authors declare no conflict of interest” two years ago may now require a completed disclosure form for every author. The only reliable source is the journal’s own current instructions.

Two places to check before you write a word of the section:

1. The “Instructions for Authors” page on the journal’s own website — search for “conflict of interest” or “competing interests” specifically, since it’s often buried under a different heading than you’d expect.
2. The submission portal itself. Many journals now require the disclosure as a structured form during upload (sometimes a standard uniform form used across a group of journals) rather than as free text in the manuscript, and you won’t see that requirement until you start the submission.

If the policy isn’t clear from either, email the editorial office and ask before you submit — it’s a normal question and far better than guessing.

What the section actually looks like

Whatever the journal’s format, the disclosure itself is usually short. Two real shapes it takes:

“The authors declare no conflict of interest.”

“This work was supported by a research grant from [Company]. [Author] has received consulting fees from [Company] unrelated to this study. The funder had no role in the design, analysis, or interpretation of the data.”

Notice the second example does two things: it names the relationship precisely, and it states — where true — that the funder had no editorial influence over the result. That second sentence is doing real work. It’s the difference between a disclosure that reassures a reader and one that just raises more questions.

Getting the phrasing exact matters more here than almost anywhere else in a manuscript, because vague wording in a COI statement reads as evasive even when nothing is being hidden. If you want a second pair of eyes on the whole submission package before it goes out — disclosure section included — that’s the kind of detail a full publication-quality edit is built to catch.

We go through disclosure statements, along with the rest of the submission checklist, in more depth in the peer review chapter of our book on fixing your academic English and publishing faster.

Want more of this kind of thing — one practical fix at a time — straight to your inbox? Subscribe to our writing and publication emails.