In 2002, a group of 45 academics wrote a letter accusing the journal of a concealed pro-industry bias, a possible lack of full and independent peer review, and a failure to disclose
conflicts of interest, citing a case in which
Gio Batta Gori, then-current
editor-in-chief, was paid $30,000 by the
Tobacco Institute to write an article later published in the journal dismissing the health risks of
secondhand smoke. The letter's coordinator later commented that the journal "reads like an industry trade publication, but it's masked as a peer-reviewed journal" and that it lacked any "credible peer-review process." In response, the journal's publisher implemented a conflict of interest disclosure policy at the journal in January 2003, shortly before the correspondence was published. In December 2025, the journal retracted an influential article published in 2000 that argued that
Glyphosate was not a carcinogen. The journal's co-editor, Martin van den Berg said the retraction "was necessary to maintain the scientific integrity of the journal". The article's conclusion were based in part on internal unpublished studies by American agricultural company
Monsanto, the makers of
Roundup, a glyphosate-based herbicide, while already published studies were not taken into account. The authors may have been paid by Monsanto, and Monsanto employers may have written part of the study, a Monsanto practice exposed in 2024. == Abstracting and indexing ==