Surgery journal bans authors who hide conflicts of interest

The Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery has announced that it will ban authors who deliberately fail to disclose any conflicts of interests from publishing again in the journal for at least a year, in an effort to emphasise how important it considers full disclosure.

The journal's editor, Andrew Wechsler, who is also chairman of the department of cardiothoracic surgery at Drexel University College of Medicine, Philadelphia, United States, has decided that any authors who are found to have failed to disclose conflicts of interests …