Data collection and coding
We retrieved the names and
affiliated hospitals of all board-certified allergists from the Japanese
Society of Allergology’s website. Following this, we compiled the
non-research payments made for lecturing, consulting, and drafting
services to these allergists by JPMA-affiliated companies from 2016 to
2020, in line with methodologies used in prior studies[28-30].
Instances of allergists with identical names were resolved by manual
searches via Google and verification through official hospital and
organizational websites, as previously described.[30,31] We excluded
payments to individuals who could not be verified as board-certified
allergists or were confirmed as ineligible physicians through our search
process from our study samples.