Who paid for the trial?

This is the standing record behind every “who paid” sentence on the site: the papers we cite, with what each one says about its own money. Every statement is quoted, not summarised, so what you read here is what the authors wrote, down to the punctuation. A manufacturer paying for a trial does not make the trial wrong; it is context the reader is entitled to see next to the finding, which is the rule set out in how we review.

@dataset{pollman_trial_funding_ledger_2026,
  author    = {Pollman, Jose},
  title     = {Trial funding ledger: funding and competing-interest statements for oral-health trials, reviews and guidelines},
  year      = {2026},
  publisher = {Zenodo},
  version   = {1},
  doi       = {10.5281/zenodo.22879103},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22879103}
}

How to read a funding statement

The commonest sentence in the table is a version of “the funder had no role in study design, data collection, analysis or the decision to publish”. It tells you something real: the sponsor did not sit in the analysis. It does not tell you who chose the comparator, the outcome or the non-inferiority margin, and those are decided before a trial starts, when the funder is very much in the room. Read it as a statement about the middle of a trial, not the beginning.

Author employment is a different disclosure from sponsorship, and the ledger keeps the two apart. A trial paid for by a company is one thing; a trial with company employees on the author list is another, and a paper can be both. Look for the initials in a competing-interests line — “JE, FM and ESc are employees of” — and then look at the author list of the systematic review that later pools the trial. The site’s own worked example is hydroxyapatite: three of the four human trials name the same manufacturer as funder or employer, and the review that pools them shares every one of its six authors with the 18-month trial it includes. The ledger shows that as two rows — P2023 and PW2024 — and the pattern is the point.

The absence of a statement is information too. A paper from 2013 with no funding line may simply predate the journal’s policy; a paper from 2019 without one is a choice. We record the absence as a literal — “No funding statement in the paper” — rather than guessing, and we record a paywall as a paywall. A sponsor-funded trial whose funding line we could not read is not evidence of anything except that we could not read it.

What this ledger cannot tell you

Funding is not fraud. Manufacturer-funded trials in this table were, as far as the abstracts and papers show, competently run; some are the only trials of their kind. Unfunded trials can be small, short and badly blinded, and several of the papers with “none declared” are exactly that. The ledger records disclosure, not quality; the quality is argued page by page, in the articles that cite each paper, with the trial’s own numbers. Nor does the ledger rank anything: the rows sort by year, topic or funder type, and that is all the ordering there is. Where a statement stayed unreadable it is a fact about publishing, not about the paper: the journals concerned are Acta Odontol Scand, Am J Dent, Am J Orthod Dentofacial Orthop, Caries Res, Cochrane Database Syst Rev, Complement Ther Med, Crit Rev Oral Biol Med, Evid Based Dent, Int J Paediatr Dent, J Breath Res, J Clin Dent, J Clin Periodontol, J Dent, J Dent Res, J Evid Based Dent Pract, J Int Acad Periodontol, whose full text sits behind a paywall or behind a site that refuses automated reading.

How a paper gets in

Someone opens the paper. The funding statement and the competing-interests statement are copied word for word, in quotation marks. Where they were read and the date they were read on are recorded with them. Nothing is paraphrased and nothing is guessed, which is why a statement behind a paywall is recorded as a paywall rather than filled in.

The data file, its fields and the five fixed phrases are documented in the field guide.

This is a record of what papers disclose about their funding, not advice about any product or treatment. Nothing here is medical or dental advice; see a dentist about your own teeth.