Transparency in infectious disease research: meta-research survey of specialty journals.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Infectious diseases carry large global burdens and have implications for society at large. Therefore, reproducible, transparent research is extremely important. METHODS: We evaluated transparency indicators (code and data sharing, registration, conflict and funding disclosures) in the 5340 PubMed Central Open Access articles published in 2019 or 2021 in the 9 most-cited specialty journals in infectious disease using the text-mining R package, rtransparent. RESULTS: 5340 articles were evaluated (1860 published in 2019 and 3480 in 2021 (of which 1828 on COVID-19)). Text-mining identified code sharing in 98 (2%) articles, data sharing in 498 (9%), registration in 446 (8%), conflict of interest disclosures in 4209 (79%) and funding disclosures in 4866 (91%). There were substantial differences across the 9 journals 1-9% for code sharing, 5-25% for data sharing, 1-31% for registration, 7-100% for conflicts of interest, and 65-100% for funding disclosures. Validation-corrected imputed estimates were 3%, 11%, 8%, 79% and 92%, respectively. There were no major differences between articles published in 2019 and non-COVID-19 articles in 2021. In 2021, non-COVID-19 articles had more data sharing (12%) than COVID-19 articles (4%). CONCLUSIONS: Data sharing, code sharing, and registration are very uncommon in infectious disease specialty journals. Increased transparency is required.