What is it about?
Randomized studies are key to assess if a medical intervention is truly effective. To be able to capture the true effect sizes of an intervention, it is crucial that all trials are registered before they start and that study results are made available after their conduct. In this paper we present a research on research study in which we determined what happened to randomized trials that received approval from ethic committees in 2016 in Switzerland, the UK, Germany and Canada.
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Why is it important?
If a study is not registered it is prone to problematic misconduct such as “cherry-picking” of outcomes. Furthermore, it is well known that studies with a positive result (e.g. confirming the efficacy of a drug) make their trial results more often publicly available in the form of a publication compared to negative results. This selective publication based of study findings (“publication bias”) leads to an overestimation of treatment effects in the available literature. Hence, it is of great importance that all trials are registered and subsequently published after trial conduct.
Perspectives
It was fantastic to observe that the rate of studies that made their results publicly available has strongly increased compared to a similar study conducted approximately 10 years ago.
Benjamin Speich
CLEAR Methods Center, Division of Clinical Epidemiology, Department of Clinical Research, University Hospital Basel, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Nonregistration, discontinuation, and nonpublication of randomized trials: A repeated metaresearch analysis, PLoS Medicine, April 2022, PLOS,
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1003980.
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