Comments on: The Scatter of Medical Research and What to do About it.

By: The Scatter of Medical Research and What to do About it. « Laika's ... | medical publishing | Scoop.it

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 08:53:43 +0000

[...] background-position: 50% 0px ; background-color:#222222; background-repeat : no-repeat; } laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com – Today, 3:53 [...]

By: Friday Foolery #51 Statistically Funny « Laika's MedLibLog

Friday Foolery #51 Statistically Funny « Laika's MedLibLog — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 22:02:24 +0000

[...] The Scatter of Medical Research and What to do About it. (laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com) [...]

By: jrbtrip

jrbtrip — Mon, 21 May 2012 05:25:09 +0000

I agree that quality wasn’t assessed, but we can extrapolate from services such as Evidence Updates (and other offerings, flawed as they are) that an awful lot of the research is pretty pointless. As you say it’s ‘chaff’. So, as well as it being pointless it also makes it harder to actually find the ‘wheat’. The whole research system is poorly designed, rewarding mediocrity.

By: laikaspoetnik

laikaspoetnik — Sun, 20 May 2012 21:31:10 +0000

Thanks for commenting, Jon.

I agree that quality is more important than quantity, although a huge quantity can make it difficult to find the high quality stuff.

You say: “An implication of the paper is that most of the research is worthwhile”.Perhaps I miss your point: the quality of the studies wasn’t really assessed, was it? Or do you mean that there are a lot of SR’s and RCT’s (which are considered of high quality).

EvidenceUpdates is just one way to help the clinicians to separate the wheat from the chaff, I think. I still find the selection and rating rather “subjective” (see example in text) although in case of “newsworthiness” that doesn’matter much. I agree it sure has got its merits.

(By the way the current paper only discusses Evidence Updates as one (imperfect) solution. It didn’t really do any research into this.)

Jacqueline

By: jrbtrip

jrbtrip — Fri, 18 May 2012 12:06:47 +0000

Thanks for the post, I appreciate it.

An implication of the paper is that most of the research is worthwhile. We know, from the likes of EvidenceUpdates rejects 96% of articles as not being high enough quality or newsworthy.

Quality is way more important than quantity, While EvidenceUpdates might have its faults, anything that can remove so much noise must surely be embraced and expanded.

BTW thanks for the mention of TRIP