Does declaration of competing interests affect readers' perceptions? A randomised trial

Conflict of interest has been defined as a set of conditions in which professional judgment concerning a primary interest (such as patient welfare or the validity of research) can be influenced by a secondary interest (such as financial gain).1 Despite increasing evidence that conflict of interest influences authors' conclusions,2–4 we found no research into the effect on readers' perceptions of research. We studied whether a declaration of financial competing interest influences readers' perceptions of the interest, importance, relevance, validity, and believability of a study. We randomly selected 300 BMJ readers from the BMA's membership database, which contains individual reader characteristics. All readers were sent a short report indicating that the impact of pain from herpes zoster on patients' daily functioning may be substantial.5 Readers in group 1 were sent a version of this paper with different named authors to the original and with a …