Visualizing Conflict of Interest in Medical Publishing

This project supports the development of data visualization tools that are part of Conflict Metrics, a broader initiative which aims to help researchers, policy-makers, providers, and patients rethink conflicts of interest over industry funding of clinical research. Conflict Metrics is the public-facing portal for data associated with S. Scott Graham's research on conflicts of interest in health and medicine. This site is devoted to providing public access to biomedical research sponsorship and funding data. During the capstone project at the Simulation and Game Applications (SAGA) Lab, we worked on a new version of the available visualization tools that enhance the current digital experience of the visualization tool. Our task was to build an interactive visualization dashboard, which affords users to explore and analyze a network association of data regarding industry and their funding of research. Users can search for areas of interest (disease-related) to filter data used in the visualization, choose the level of granularity (journal or author level), and choose among different network layouts. Also, requested features included interactive network-graph functionality using the R VizNetwork package.