Review and Analysis of Publication Trends over Three Decades in Three High Impact Medicine Journals.

Context: Over the past three decades, industry sponsored research expanded in the United States. Financial incentives can lead to potential conflicts of interest (COI) resulting in underreporting of negative study results.

Objective: We hypothesized that over the three decades, there would be an increase in: a) reporting of conflict of interest and source of funding; b) percentage of randomized control trials c) number of patients per study and d) industry funding.