All scientific content of the BMJ should declare authors' conflicts of interest

EDITOR— The BMJ's practice of declaring any conflict of interest that the authors of papers may have encourages critical appraisal. In medical literature, however, as in politics, attempts to make public the interests of policymakers, sometimes voluntarily, seem now to require reinforcement. The BMJ has published a news item about the New England Journal of Medicine's failure to mention a conflict of interest for the reviewer of a book linking environmental pollutants to cancer.1

The BMJ risks similar revelations because …