Abstract Many autistic people (including researchers and non-researchers) are becoming increasingly involved in, and increasingly critical of, autism intervention research. They have expressed concerns regarding applied behavior analysis (ABA) interventions on a number of grounds, one of which is the prevalence of conflicts of interest (COIs) among autism intervention researchers. These concerns are now also being addressed by non-autistic researchers. COIs can introduce bias into the research process, and allow researchers to demonstrate positive effects for interventions that are not actually effective. Despite these concerns, there are no studies to date that examine the prevalence of COIs in behavioral journals. Because ABA services are routinely provided to autistic people in the United States as a means to address difficulties experienced by autistic people, this is an important area of investigation. We tallied author COIs in articles published over a one-year period that tested, commented on, or reviewed ABA autism intervention strategies, extracted from eight journals devoted to publishing behavioral research. We coded included studies for COIs related to researcher employment as an ABA clinical provider or a training consultant to ABA clinical providers. We found that 84% of studies had at least one author with this type of COI, but they were only disclosed as COIs in 2% of studies. Additionally, 87% of studies with statements claiming the authors did not have COIs, were authored by researchers found to have clinical/training consultancy COIs. Pervasive, undisclosed COIs likely lead to researcher bias, and could at least partially account for persistent poor quality research in this area. The high prevalence of COIs among this research corroborates the concerns expressed by many autistic people. The autism community-- including autistic people, autism researchers, and other stakeholders-- should be aware of the prevalence of undisclosed COIs in this literature and take this into account when using, providing, or recommending ABA services.

中文翻译：

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应用行为分析自闭症文献中普遍存在的未公开利益冲突

摘要许多自闭症患者（包括研究人员和非研究人员）正越来越多地参与自闭症干预研究并对其提出批评。他们出于多种原因对应用行为分析（ABA）干预表示了担忧，其中之一是自闭症干预研究人员中普遍存在利益冲突（COI）。现在，非自闭症研究人员也正在解决这些问题。COI可以将偏见引入研究过程，并允许研究人员证明对实际上无效的干预措施的积极作用。尽管存在这些担忧，但迄今为止，尚无任何研究来研究行为期刊中COI的发生率。由于美国通常会向自闭症患者提供ABA服务，以解决自闭症患者遇到的困难，因此这是一个重要的研究领域。我们在一年内发表的文章中对作者的COI进行了统计，这些文章对ABA自闭症干预策略进行了测试，评论或审查，该论文摘自八篇致力于发表行为研究的期刊。我们对包括与研究人员作为ABA临床提供者或ABA临床提供者的培训顾问相关的COI的研究进行了编码。我们发现84％的研究中至少有一位作者是此类COI的作者，但只有2％的研究将其公开为COI。此外，有87％的陈述声称作者没有COI的研究是由发现具有临床/培训咨询COI的研究人员撰写的。普遍的，未公开的COI可能会导致研究人员偏见，并且至少可以部分解释该领域持续存在的质量差的研究。在这项研究中，COI的普遍性证实了许多自闭症患者表达的担忧。自闭症社区-包括自闭症患者，自闭症研究人员和其他利益相关者-应该了解这些文献中未公开COI的普遍性，并在使用，提供或推荐ABA服务时将其考虑在内。