Declare Your Interests

reframe disclosure to improve quality and increase compliance

Problem: Editors are not receiving conflict of information disclosures / Authors are not providing declarations of interest statements.

Solution: Web app that walks authors through a Q&A to determine the interests they should disclose to protect integrity of their research, and then generates a declaration they can include with their submission.

Result: 32% increase in interest statements included with article submissions

Background

  • Stakeholders wanted to optimize for editors — not authors. They initially requested an 'AI solution’ that would simply check whether a Conflict of Interests statement (COI) had been included within the entirety of the submission. (Example: Interests are often disclosed in the Acknowledgements section)

  • Many fields and societies require an additional statement of interests that required the author(s) to answer questions about direct and indirect support for the research submitted and their other work. This means many researchers are required to supply this information in various formats.

RESEARCH FINDINGS

  • Early-career researchers receive little to no guidance about what is considered at interest and the extent to which potential conflicts of interests should be disclosed.

  • ‘Negative’ framing skews the information provided by the user. Referring to this as a Conflict of Interest statement assumes there is already a known conflict of interest.

SOLUTION

  • Guide users through process of creating a more formal statement of interests. Base the Q&A off the questionnaire most widely used by physical sciences journals, but adapt it for use in journals across all fields of research.

  • Use responses to craft statement without requiring additional information or composition by the author.

USER JOURNEY

  • If it isn’t obvious, I love mapping workflows. Using existing journal and society questionnaires, I identified commonalities and crafted a general-yet-specific workflow that could be used for most scenarios and journals.

  • Given early-career researchers are one of our largest user groups or personas, we wanted to seize the opportunity to educate them about what information should be reported when submitting a paper for peer review.

  • We initially had to convince our stakeholders why it was important to ‘force’ users through all questions — while doing so with enough flexibility for more knowledgable or returning users to quickly advance to the final screen.

(These are all screenshots of the existing web app. This was the last project I designed using Sketch, and I would subsequently lose those design files when my Macbook unceremoniously died in spring 2022.)