Searching clinical trial registries is an essential tool to improve the value of systematic reviews. This is a resource review on a paper that describes whether and how this is done in published systematic reviews of pharmacotherapy and assesses their quantitative impact on meta-analysis.
What is grey literature, when would you use it, what are its advantages and disadvantages, and how can you find it?
Concerns are being raised whether the medical field can play by the same rules as the other sciences when it comes to preprints. Yunus Gokkir discusses benefits and risks of preprints in this blog.
In this blog, Neelam Khan, a fourth year dental student at the University of Manchester, looks at the latest Cochrane evidence on the full publication of study results initially presented in abstracts and reflects on the implications of the findings.
Publication bias remains a problem in health research. This blog by Andrés explores the issues we face and provides detail of the initiatives designed to address the problem.
This blog discusses fundamental issues affecting healthcare research, which could undermine the field and mean that most medical research may be wrong. Issues discussed include: 1) contradictory findings 2) the illusion of high impact factor journals 3) the reproducibility crisis 4) a lack of translation of research findings from bench to bedside 5) medical reversal 6) bias 7) statistical issues and 8) conflicts of interest and unethical practice. The author then explores possible solutions to these.
‘Evidence-based practice’ is a commonly used phrase. But this blog asks the question: ‘just how much can we trust published scientific literature?’ with particular reference to the problems of publication bias and statistical approaches.
In Richard’s Reviews this week, we look at progress in sharing clinical trial data through the All Trials campaign, and the nature of patient-centred outcomes research.
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