By Neuroskeptic in Discover Magazine
A remarkable scandal has erupted
concerning the editorial standards of two scientific journals.
The journals are called Research
in Autism Spectrum Disorders (RASD) and Research in Developmental
Disabilities (RIDD). Both publications are owned by Elsevier,
and they have the same Editor-in-Chief, Johnny
L. Matson. Or at least they did until recently. Matson may have been
removed – although it’s not clear if there is a replacement for him.
The scandal emerged some weeks ago
after Oxford University researcher Dorothy Bishop emailed RASD to say that she
had concerns about the journal. Bishop asked to be taken off their editorial
board. Instead of just Bishop’s name being removed, however, all information
about the editors disappeared from the websites of both RASD and RIDD.
Overnight they became, as Bishop put it, Journals Without Editors.
After Bishop blogged about this,
things got even stranger. We learned, for instance, that Matson was in the
habit of accepting papers without sending them off for peer review, acting as
sole handling editor. He also published a large amount of his own work in the
journals he edited. (Matson’s pattern of behavior is eerily reminiscent of the case of Head and Neck Oncology and its editor
Waseem Jerjes that Neuroskeptic readers may remember.)
Anyway, Bishop’s post certainly
raise questions over Matson’s conduct as an editor. But I’ve done some digging
and I have other concerns about his work, namely, I’m concerned about apparent
undeclared conflicts of interest.
Matson is an autism researcher and
much of his work concerns the diagnosis and evaluation of this disorder. Over
the years Matson has developed over a dozen questionnaires and other rating
scales, ranging from the Baby and Infant Screen for Children with aUtIsm Traits
(BISCUIT) to the Profile of Toileting Issues (POTI).
All of these instruments are sold
via a company called Disability Consulting, LLC, based in Baton Rouge,
Louisiana. The listed contact email address is for one Dean Matson, who’s also the Director. The only products listed on their
website are Matson assessment tools. They cost up to $325.00 per kit (each kit
includes 50 score sheets.)
So Johnny Matson and/or his family
seem to have a direct financial interest in the promotion of Matson’s various
assessment kits. Such conflicts of interests are not unethical in themselves,
but they ought to be declared whenever a researcher publishes a paper on a
topic relevant to his or her interests.
The problem is that as far as I can
see, Matson does not declare any conflict of interest (CoI) in his academic
papers, even when the topic of the paper is his own instruments. For example,
Matson’s most recent paper concerns the PIMRA-II, which he
developed. There is no CoI declaration. Nor was there a CoI section on this review article which discusses a number of
Matson’s tools. Both of these papers appeared in RIDD. Some of Matson’s recent
publications in other journals do include CoI sections but in these cases,
Matson regularly declares that he has no competing interests, as in here (2013) and here (2014).
This situation strikes me as
problematic.
Update 17.02.2015: Both RASD and RIDD seem to have inconsistent reporting of
CoIs. The phrase “conflict of interest” appears in 96 RASD papers, but the
journal has published at least 1050 papers. In RIDD, the ratio is 287 / 3003.
So in both cases, less than 10% of published papers include any mention on CoIs
(this includes declarations that no conflict exists.)
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