Nearly one-third of social media research has undisclosed ties to industry, preprint claims

Joe Bak-Coleman and coauthors determine that researchers' undisclosed ties to industry might be skewing research. In a pre-print available now through arXiv, the authors find that industry ties reflect relatively weak disclosure norms in need of strengthening. In a conversation with Science, Bak-Coleman suggests that "journals should audit all the social media research they have published and in cases where undisclosed conflicts did breach a journal’s criteria, they should correct the scientific record." Moreover, the authors' results are consistent with the possibility "that industry funding in this area is redirecting attention from products to consumers."