Dollars for Profs
Dig Into University Researchers' Outside Income and Conflicts of Interest
Published Dec. 6, 2019
This database was last updated in December 2019 and should only be used as a historical snapshot. There may be new or amended records not reflected here.
Help Us Report On Conflicts of Interest at Universities
Professors frequently obtain lucrative outside work. Such commitments may potentially influence their research topics and findings, as well as their legislative and courtroom testimony. Almost all major universities and research institutions require faculty to report any outside work they do or income they earn. Yet these reports are often inaccessible to the public, the media and even members of the academic community.
Through public records requests, we have collected more than 37,000 financial disclosures for professors and staff at about 20 public universities and researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health.
Now, we need your help. We have created this immense database, but we don’t always know what to dig into. Whether you’re a student, professor, dean or just a savvy citizen investigator, we hope you’ll look through the data and help us flag interesting leads. Or tell us about conflicts that don’t show up in the data.
If you see an error in the database or a reason we should not disclose a record, please contact us at [email protected] and we'll evaluate it on a case-by-case basis.
Notes: When a more specific filing date is not available for an individual financial disclosure or conflict of interest form, we use the year the form was filed. If the year was not disclosed, we report the range of years covered by our public records requests. In a few cases, a start date was provided instead of a filing date. In those cases, we use the start date instead.
Fewer than 10% of records from the University of Florida and fewer than 1% of records from the University of Texas system were removed because they did not contain enough information.
ProPublica obtained additional financial disclosures and conflict of interest forms that we have not yet digitized and added to the database. You can download those disclosures in the ProPublica Data Store.