John Ioannidis argues that problem base, context placement, information gain, pragmatism, patient centeredness, value for money, feasibility, and transparency define useful clinical research. He ...suggests most clinical research is not useful and reform is overdue.
Ioannidis offers insight on the proposed lowering of the P values to .005. He notes that P values and accompanying methods of statistical significance testing are creating challenges in biomedical ...science and other disciplines. He considers lowering the threshold of statistical significance is a temporizing measure.
We have empirically assessed the distribution of published effect sizes and estimated power by analyzing 26,841 statistical records from 3,801 cognitive neuroscience and psychology papers published ...recently. The reported median effect size was D = 0.93 (interquartile range: 0.64-1.46) for nominally statistically significant results and D = 0.24 (0.11-0.42) for nonsignificant results. Median power to detect small, medium, and large effects was 0.12, 0.44, and 0.73, reflecting no improvement through the past half-century. This is so because sample sizes have remained small. Assuming similar true effect sizes in both disciplines, power was lower in cognitive neuroscience than in psychology. Journal impact factors negatively correlated with power. Assuming a realistic range of prior probabilities for null hypotheses, false report probability is likely to exceed 50% for the whole literature. In light of our findings, the recently reported low replication success in psychology is realistic, and worse performance may be expected for cognitive neuroscience.
Meta-research is the study of research itself: its methods, reporting, reproducibility, evaluation, and incentives. Given that science is the key driver of human progress, improving the efficiency of ...scientific investigation and yielding more credible and more useful research results can translate to major benefits. The research enterprise grows very fast. Both new opportunities for knowledge and innovation and new threats to validity and scientific integrity emerge. Old biases abound, and new ones continuously appear as novel disciplines emerge with different standards and challenges. Meta-research uses an interdisciplinary approach to study, promote, and defend robust science. Major disruptions are likely to happen in the way we pursue scientific investigation, and it is important to ensure that these disruptions are evidence based.
Recent concerns about the reproducibility of science have led to several calls for more open and transparent research practices and for the monitoring of potential improvements over time. However, ...with tens of thousands of new biomedical articles published per week, manually mapping and monitoring changes in transparency is unrealistic. We present an open-source, automated approach to identify 5 indicators of transparency (data sharing, code sharing, conflicts of interest disclosures, funding disclosures, and protocol registration) and apply it across the entire open access biomedical literature of 2.75 million articles on PubMed Central (PMC). Our results indicate remarkable improvements in some (e.g., conflict of interest COI disclosures and funding disclosures), but not other (e.g., protocol registration and code sharing) areas of transparency over time, and map transparency across fields of science, countries, journals, and publishers. This work has enabled the creation of a large, integrated, and openly available database to expedite further efforts to monitor, understand, and promote transparency and reproducibility in science.
In a 2005 paper that has been accessed more than a million times, John Ioannidis explained why most published research findings were false. Here he revisits the topic, this time to address how to ...improve matters. Please see later in the article for the Editors' Summary.
Citation metrics are widely used and misused. We have created a publicly available database of 100,000 top scientists that provides standardized information on citations, h-index, ...coauthorship-adjusted hm-index, citations to papers in different authorship positions, and a composite indicator. Separate data are shown for career-long and single-year impact. Metrics with and without self-citations and ratio of citations to citing papers are given. Scientists are classified into 22 scientific fields and 176 subfields. Field- and subfield-specific percentiles are also provided for all scientists who have published at least five papers. Career-long data are updated to end of 2017 and to end of 2018 for comparison.
To estimate the infection fatality rate of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) from seroprevalence data.
I searched PubMed and preprint servers for COVID-19 seroprevalence studies with a sample size ...≥ 500 as of 9 September 2020. I also retrieved additional results of national studies from preliminary press releases and reports. I assessed the studies for design features and seroprevalence estimates. I estimated the infection fatality rate for each study by dividing the cumulative number of COVID-19 deaths by the number of people estimated to be infected in each region. I corrected for the number of immunoglobin (Ig) types tested (IgG, IgM, IgA).
I included 61 studies (74 estimates) and eight preliminary national estimates. Seroprevalence estimates ranged from 0.02% to 53.40%. Infection fatality rates ranged from 0.00% to 1.63%, corrected values from 0.00% to 1.54%. Across 51 locations, the median COVID-19 infection fatality rate was 0.27% (corrected 0.23%): the rate was 0.09% in locations with COVID-19 population mortality rates less than the global average (< 118 deaths/million), 0.20% in locations with 118-500 COVID-19 deaths/million people and 0.57% in locations with > 500 COVID-19 deaths/million people. In people younger than 70 years, infection fatality rates ranged from 0.00% to 0.31% with crude and corrected medians of 0.05%.
The infection fatality rate of COVID-19 can vary substantially across different locations and this may reflect differences in population age structure and case-mix of infected and deceased patients and other factors. The inferred infection fatality rates tended to be much lower than estimates made earlier in the pandemic.
The article discusses the emerging picture of nutritional epidemiologic research and how many a times one finds it very difficult to reconcile with good scientific principles. The need to reform ...nutritional epidemiologic research is demonstrated. Some of the challenges associated with bringing about a reform are highlighted.
Meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies (GWASs) has become a popular method for discovering genetic risk variants. Here, we overview both widely applied and newer statistical methods for ...GWAS meta-analysis, including issues of interpretation and assessment of sources of heterogeneity. We also discuss extensions of these meta-analysis methods to complex data. Where possible, we provide guidelines for researchers who are planning to use these methods. Furthermore, we address special issues that may arise for meta-analysis of sequencing data and rare variants. Finally, we discuss challenges and solutions surrounding the goals of making meta-analysis data publicly available and building powerful consortia.
PDF
