Jul 19, 2023 01:03 PM
How many clinical-trial studies in medical journals are fake or fatally flawed? In October 2020, John Carlisle reported a startling estimate.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02299-w
EXCERPTS: Carlisle, an anaesthetist who works for England’s National Health Service, is renowned for his ability to spot dodgy data in medical trials. He is also an editor at the journal Anaesthesia, and in 2017, he decided to scour all the manuscripts he handled that reported a randomized controlled trial (RCT) — the gold standard of medical research. Over three years, he scrutinized more than 500 studies.
[...] “I think journals should assume that all submitted papers are potentially flawed and editors should review individual patient data before publishing randomised controlled trials,” Carlisle wrote in his report.
[...] The issue is, in part, a subset of the notorious paper-mill problem: over the past decade, journals in many fields have published tens of thousands of suspected fake papers, some of which are thought to have been produced by third-party firms, termed paper mills.
[...] Many research-integrity specialists say that the problem exists, but its extent and impact are unclear. Some doubt whether the issue is as bad as the most alarming examples suggest. “We have to recognize that, in the field of high-quality evidence, we increasingly have a lot of noise. There are some good people championing that and producing really scary statistics. But there are also a lot in the academic community who think this is scaremongering,” says Žarko Alfirević, a specialist in fetal and maternal medicine at the University of Liverpool, UK.
This year, he and others are conducting more studies to assess how bad the problem is. Initial results from a study led by Alfirević are not encouraging... (MORE - missing details)
PAPER: https://associationofanaesthetists-publi...anae.15263
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02299-w
EXCERPTS: Carlisle, an anaesthetist who works for England’s National Health Service, is renowned for his ability to spot dodgy data in medical trials. He is also an editor at the journal Anaesthesia, and in 2017, he decided to scour all the manuscripts he handled that reported a randomized controlled trial (RCT) — the gold standard of medical research. Over three years, he scrutinized more than 500 studies.
[...] “I think journals should assume that all submitted papers are potentially flawed and editors should review individual patient data before publishing randomised controlled trials,” Carlisle wrote in his report.
[...] The issue is, in part, a subset of the notorious paper-mill problem: over the past decade, journals in many fields have published tens of thousands of suspected fake papers, some of which are thought to have been produced by third-party firms, termed paper mills.
[...] Many research-integrity specialists say that the problem exists, but its extent and impact are unclear. Some doubt whether the issue is as bad as the most alarming examples suggest. “We have to recognize that, in the field of high-quality evidence, we increasingly have a lot of noise. There are some good people championing that and producing really scary statistics. But there are also a lot in the academic community who think this is scaremongering,” says Žarko Alfirević, a specialist in fetal and maternal medicine at the University of Liverpool, UK.
This year, he and others are conducting more studies to assess how bad the problem is. Initial results from a study led by Alfirević are not encouraging... (MORE - missing details)
PAPER: https://associationofanaesthetists-publi...anae.15263