weasel words

[whswhs]

It has become the custom for authors of scientific papers to make a statement about conflict of interest. I have been seeing a recurrent wording in papers by Chinese authors:

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.A

Comments

[selenite]

I've been having a lot of concerns over academic research. Most of them are driven by the Gresham's Law-type behavior of researchers needing to get good-looking results rather than accurate ones if they want their PhD/a job/tenure.

Seeing this kind of weasel-wording doesn't ease my qualms.