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.