Bad science hunters

Image by Medicine 2.0 via Flickr

Image by Medicine 2.0 via Flickr

I discover on the web many of those bad science hunters whose ultimate goal is to spread the knowledge of scientist’s misconducts, false statements and false results, methods or contents.

In their blogs they point the responsibilities of bad authors.

Retraction watch unmasks the articles retracted for a wide range of reasons.

Embargo watch describe the cases where authors had already published their data without telling it to the editor.

Abnormal science blog is a German blog (in English) dedicated to bad behaviour in science.

Rédaction Médicale et Scientifique is a French blog describing the bad habits of the medical scientific writing.

The Gary Schwitzer’s blog reveals the marketing and advertising hidden behind the appearance of science and tackles the disease mongering.

I respect highly all those persons involved for the best interest of science in a daily battle against bad science. Their disinterested independence is a shield in a world of egoism, financial and political greed and protect us against those who misrepresent scientific facts for political or financial gain.

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• Morality and Science (timzimmermann.com)
• Cafe Scientifique Brings Science to the Pub (shareable.net)

Subgroup analyses

Heterogeneity in treatment effects

Subgroup analysis is the core of interpretation of random controlled trials. But it must respect some strictly defined rules otherwise it will lead the reader to dangerous misinterpretation. A recent article (2010) by Kent et al exposes a very useful checklist for authors as well as for readers.

A given treatment induces a 25% Relative Risk Reduction of a given disease; a subgroup analysis implemented on one hand in a low risk of disease group of subjects versus in an other hand in a high risk of disease group of subjects will lead to an Absolute Risk Reduction of 1% versus 5% and a number of subjects needed to treat to prevent one additional disease of 100 versus 20. What is at stakes for health policy decision makers, care providers and patients is no less than efficacy, efficiency and harms of treatments grounded on evidence based results.

In their open access article the authors, from the Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies (Boston, MA, USA) and from the Center for statistics in Medicine (University of Oxford, UK) and from the department of Hygiene and Epidemiology (Ioannini, Greece) clearly expose the advantages and limits of the subgroup analysis techniques, weather they aim at exploratory research without immediate clinical implication or they attempt to further confirm an already strong a priori pathophysiological or empirical knowledge.

According to those authors, for reporting on subgroup analysis and heterogeneity in treatment effects, health services authors should:

Evaluate the distribution of the risk of disease in the overall study population before any treatment using a pre-specified externally developed risk prediction model (eg: risk score).

Pre-specify the subgroups including the threshold values for continuous or ordinal variables (except for clearly labelled exploratory purposes which are potentially useful for hypothesis generation and informing future research but having little or no immediate relevance to patient care).

Report the statistical significance between subgroups using interaction terms (testing for the significance of a treatment effect within a subgroup is inappropriate due to poor statistical power).

Correct the statistical comparisons for the number of the number of primary subgroup analysis performed.

The full text of the entire article is available in open access here.

doi:10.1186/1745-6215-11-85
Cite this article as: Kent et al.: Assessing and reporting heterogeneity in
treatment effects in clinical trials: a proposal. Trials 2010 11:85

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Keep libel laws out of science

When a lawyer of San Francisco threatens a scientific journal for having published an article which alter the economic interests of his client there is a problem. But when the scientific journal retracts the article saying there is a conflict of interest there is really an expression of concern.
The full article of retraction watch his readable here.

An other article have been retracted for politic reasons here.

Science appears more and more in danger of being attacked by lawyers or politics. That’s why a charitable trust named Sense About Science is struggling for independence of science.

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Guideline

Guidelines are so frequent now in the field of the scholarly publishing of health research studies (more than 100 reporting guidelines) that some scientific authors thought it was necessary to write a guideline explicating  how to write a guideline! In one word to make it short : a guideline of guideline. I’m no joking; here is the proof: journal.pmed.1000217. The authors of this guideline on how to develop a guideline are all Anglo-Saxons (Canadian, North American and English). I wonder if such a proposition could have been undertaken by Latin people? 😉

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Evaluation of Scientific Publications

Image via Wikipedia

In his blog named “OH-world” John Cherrie from Edinburgh, United Kingdom, signaled us an interesting series of seventeen articles freely available in full text on PubMedCentral. The first of the series is entitled Critical Appraisal of Scientific Articles; Part 1 of a Series on Evaluation of Scientific Publications.

The title of the following ones are listed below:

1. Critical Appraisal of Scientific Articles

2. Study Design in Medical Research

3. Types of Study in Medical Research

4. Confidence Interval or P-Value?

5. Requirements and Assessment of Laboratory Tests: Inpatient Admission Screening

6. Systematic Literature Reviews and Meta-Analyses

7. The Specification of Statistical Measures and Their Presentation in Tables and Graphs

8. Avoiding Bias in Observational Studies

9. Interpreting Results in 2×2 Tables

10. Judging a Plethora of p-Values: How to Contend With the Problem of Multiple Testing

11. Data Analysis of Epidemiological Studies

12. Choosing statistical tests

13. Sample size calculation in clinical trials

14. Linear regression analysis

15. Survival analysis

16. Concordance analysis

17. Randomized controlled trials

An other way to be able to evaluate a scientific article in medicine is to read the fourteen articles constituting the Clinical Chemistry Guide to Scientific Writing. The first article is entitled The Title Says It All.
The following articles are listed below:
Part 1. The Title Says It All

Part 2. The Abstract and the Elevator Talk: A Tale of Two Summaries

Part 3. “It was a cold and rainy night”: Set the Scene with a Good Introduction

Part 4. Who, What, When, Where, How, and Why: The Ingredients in the Recipe for a Successful Methods Section

Part 5. Show Your Cards: The Results Section and the Poker Game

Part 6. If an IRDAM Journal Is What You Choose, Then Sequential Results Are What You Use

Part 7. Put Your Best Figure Forward: Line Graphs and Scattergrams

Part 8. Bars and Pies Make Better Desserts than Figures

Part 9. Bring Your Best to the Table

Part 10. The Discussion Section: Your Closing Argument

Part 11. Giving Credit: Citations and References

Part 12. How to Write a Rave Review

Part 13. Top 10 Tips for Responding to Reviewer and Editor Comments

Part 14. Passing the Paternité Test

We thank Hervé Maisonneuve for having signaled this Guide in his blog.

Short Sentence

When writing an article we are often tented to use only short sentences. I is not always the best solution. “For the love of editing” advises us  to first make short  sentence and then articulate or combine them with coordinating conjunction or subordinating conjunction with the aim of describing their relationship.  You can use coordinating conjunction between two short sentences of equal importance and subordinating conjunction between two short sentences when one is influenced by the other.

coordinating conjunctions are for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so.

subordinating conjunctions are listed below:

An other important point when we write an article is that we must think that we are allowed to use the first person I or We. This can avoid a mistake about who is speaking when you use the term the author. It can avoid the anthropomorphism of a sentence like “the experiment demonstrates the hypothesis…” or the passive voice  “the hypothesis is demonstrated”. You would better write instead: “we demonstrated the hypothesis was true”. Examples are given by the APA style blog in posts like “me, myself, and I” or ” use of first person in APA style“.

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comparative effectiveness research

Image via Wikipedia

Comparative effectiveness research is heavily debated in the US between those who believe in its capacity to enhance the quality of health care and those who see in it a mean used by government agencies to save (or cut) costs in health care. The blogger Kevin in two posts enlightens the second point of view:

http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2010/12/comparative-effectiveness-research-cer-honest-discussion.html

http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2011/03/differences-comparative-clinical-effectiveness.html

Writing

Abbreviations of mathematical variables have to be italicised.

Which kind of list would you choose? A lettered, numbered, or bulleted list?

If you hesitate , refer to the table:

Punctuation and capitalization after punctuation represent another relevant issue if you search the best grammar for your paper:
The American Psychological Association blog gives you timeline advices on this matter.

Does the punctuation must be placed inside or outside the quotation marks? the answer is here.

How to perform a good academic writing (part II)

1) Choose a topic for your research paper that is debatable, plausible and consequential.

and that is not too broad but also not too narrow.

2) draft an outline with a question, a thesis, proofs (main reasons, supported ideas) and conclusion based on proofs.

For your introduction use an inverse pyramid from broad to specific ie from what have been already done (don’t reinvent the wheel) to your specific thesis

For your conclusion rearrange the pyramid from specific to broad ie what your data prove and is it generalizable?

3) Write

Lower your standards when beginning a writing project: don’t try to be perfect on your first attempt

Manage writing time, write ten minutes a day

Check for Consistency

Delete unnecessary words

How to perform a good academic writing?

An associate professor of psychology gives us some pragmatical advises to struggle against procrastination in writing. And a blog is specialized on editing methods. This blog shares with us thoughts of an editor on life and grammar.