Methods
This cross-sectional study evaluates the size and prevalence of industry
payments to infectious disease editors in the US. This study considered
the top five clinical infectious disease journals based on their 5-year
impact factors according to the 2022 Journal Citation Reports, as well
as two US-based journals in the field of infectious diseases. However,
the Lancet Infectious Diseases (5-year impact factor: 38.5) was
excluded, as the Open Payments Database only covers physicians with U.S.
medical licensure, and it did not have editors with U.S. medical
licensure. Therefore, this study included all US-based physician editors
of the six infectious disease journals:
Journal of Infection (5-year
impact factor: 15.8), Journal of Travel Medicine (5-year impact factor:
13.0), Clinical Microbiology and Infection (5-year impact factor: 10.7),
Clinical Infectious Diseases (5-year impact factor: 10.1), Emerging
Infectious Disease (5-year impact factor: 8.7), and Journal of
Infectious Disease (5-year impact factor: 5.4). Information for all
editors was collected in July 2023 from various sources, including the
U.S. government, professional medical societies, hospitals, and
universities. Payments to these editors were extracted from the Open
Payments Database for the period between 2014 and 2022, as described in
previous studies.[2,9] The data were then descriptively analyzed.
Additionally, this study assessed whether the journals publicly
disclosed information regarding the editors’ conflicts of interest. To
adjust for inflation in US dollars, all payment values were converted to
2022-US dollar value using the annual average consumer price index
between 2014 and 2022.