What Does ‘Unpaid Consultant’ Signify? A Survey of Euphemistic Language in Conflict of Interest Declarations

Inadequate competing interest declarations present interpretive challenges for editors, reviewers, and readers. We systematically studied a common euphemism, 'unpaid consultant,' to determine its occurrence in declarations and its association with vested interests, authors, and journals.We used Google Scholar, a search engine that routinely includes disclosures, to identify 1164 occurrences and 787 unique biomedical journal publications between...