With universities and medical researchers under growing pressure to tighten up their conflict-of-interest policies, a Georgia State University professor may have found another place for them to look a little harder.

Leslie E. Wolf, an associate professor of law at Georgia State, has published a study in IRB: Ethics & Human Research in which she reviewed the institutional review board policies of 117 medical schools that receive money from the National Institutes of Health.

Ms. Wolf said she found that less than half of the IRB policies cover the topic of finder fees or bonus payments, as a way of preventing members of a research team from getting payments to help recruit study participants.

Such policies are important, Ms. Wolf said, because researchers and their colleagues might otherwise be tempted to enroll ineligible study participants.

Ms. Wolf said examples of the problem include the case of Ellen M. Roche, a 24-year-old laboratory technician who was to have received $365 for participating in a study sponsored by her employer, the Johns Hopkins Asthma and Allergy Center. Ms. Roche died of lung failure in 2001, at the age of 24, after she was given an experimental compound as part of an asthma study. —Paul Basken