Conflict-of-interest disclosure is one of the most misunderstood obligations in research publishing. Authors often treat it as an accusation to be avoided — as if declaring an interest were an admission of bias. It is the opposite. Disclosure exists to protect the reader, and a declared interest is a sign of good faith, not of wrongdoing. This guide explains what counts as a competing interest, how the standard disclosure model works, and how this declaration fits alongside the other statements an author now makes. It connects to the author-side declarations described at the author statement and the parallel disclosure covered in the AI-use disclosure guidance.
What a conflict of interest actually is
A conflict of interest — many journals prefer the less loaded term competing interest — exists when a secondary interest could, in a reasonable observer’s view, improperly influence the conduct or reporting of research. The key word is could. A conflict is about the potential for influence, not proof that influence occurred. You do not need to believe your judgment was actually affected; you need only recognise that an outside reader, knowing the interest, might reasonably weigh your conclusions differently. That is why disclosure is the remedy: it hands the reader the information they need to make that judgment for themselves.
Conflicts come in several forms, and all are disclosable:
- Financial interests: research funding, consultancy or speaker fees, employment, stock or equity, patents and royalties, paid expert testimony, and gifts. Financial interests are the most scrutinised because they are the most measurable.
- Personal and professional relationships: close personal ties, rivalries, or affiliations that could shape how the work is reported or reviewed.
- Intellectual or academic commitments: strongly held prior positions, or a role advocating for a particular view, that a reader might reasonably want to know about.
- Institutional interests: interests held by the author’s employer that bear on the work.
The standard: the ICMJE disclosure model
The dominant framework in biomedical and much of STEM publishing comes from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), whose recommendations include a standard disclosure approach now adopted very widely. Its design has two features worth understanding.
First, it asks each author to disclose individually. A competing interest belongs to a person, so every named author completes their own declaration rather than the corresponding author guessing on the others’ behalf. Second, it asks about a defined recent window — the ICMJE form covers interests over the preceding 36 months — rather than leaving “relevant” to the author’s discretion. Bounding the question makes disclosure more consistent and harder to under-report by omission.
The ICMJE model also asks specifically about the relationship between any interest and the submitted work: money paid to you or your institution, the role of any funder in the study’s design, conduct, or reporting, and so on. The point is to surface not just that an interest exists but how it connects to this particular paper.
How to approach your own disclosure
- Disclose when in doubt. The cost of declaring an interest that turns out to be immaterial is essentially nil; the cost of an undisclosed interest that later surfaces is serious — corrections, expressions of concern, and reputational damage. Asymmetry of risk argues for over-disclosure.
- Disclose interests, not just judgments about them. It is not your job to decide whether an interest biased you. State the interest and let editors and readers weigh it.
- Cover the defined window for every author. Circulate the disclosure question to all co-authors and collect each person’s declaration against the same time frame.
- Name the funder and its role. Funding is a competing interest, and readers are entitled to know whether the funder shaped the design, analysis, or decision to publish. “The funder had no role in…” is itself a meaningful disclosure.
- Keep it current. If an interest arises between submission and publication, update the declaration.
A useful test: imagine the interest being revealed after publication by someone else. If that revelation would embarrass you or undermine trust in the work, it should have been disclosed. Disclose it now.
Where COI sits among an author’s disclosures
Competing-interests disclosure is now one of a small family of declarations an author makes at submission, and it helps to see them together. The contribution statement records who did what. The AI-use disclosure records which tools were used and where. The competing-interests declaration records what might bias the reporting. Each answers a different transparency question, and none substitutes for another: a thorough contribution statement does not excuse an undisclosed financial interest, and a clean competing-interests declaration says nothing about contribution. Treat them as a set, completed deliberately rather than copied from a previous paper.
A note on funding bodies and institutions
Disclosure obligations do not stop at the journal. Many funders and most institutions operate their own financial conflict-of-interest policies, often with formal thresholds and an annual reporting cycle. These are separate from the publication declaration and can be more demanding. An author with significant financial interests should assume that the institutional disclosure and the journal disclosure are both required, and that they should tell a consistent story.
Where shared vocabulary fits
“Conflict of interest”, “competing interest”, “financial interest”, and “funder role” are defined differently across journals, funders, and institutions, and that inconsistency makes a single author’s obligations hard to reconcile. A shared, federated vocabulary that defines these terms precisely — pointing back to ICMJE for the publication standard and to funder and institutional policy for the regulatory layer — is what lets one disclosure serve several systems coherently. Supplying that definitional layer is the role the CASRAI dictionary is designed to play; the relevant terms sit in the compliance-and-regulatory domain.