Bad science is affecting clinical guidelines, but now an Australian professor has a solution.
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“I’m surprised by the limited response from people in my field on this issue,” he says. “It’s a topic people don’t want to talk about.” The problem gets bad when these poor-quality papers are laundered by systematic reviews or meta-analyses in prestigious journals. These studies aggregate hundreds of papers to produce gold-standard scientific evidence for whether a particular treatment works.
There’s a litany of other examples where discounting dodgy data can fundamentally alter the evidence that shapes clinical guidelines. That’s why, in, Mol and his colleagues have reported a new way to weed out bad science before it makes it to the clinic.The new tool is called the Research Integrity in Guidelines and evIDence synthesis framework. It mightn’t sound sexy, but it’s like a barbed-wire fence that can hold back the zombie horde.
“You can look at strange features in the data, only using rounded numbers, only using even numbers. There are studies where out of dozens of pairs of numbers, everything is even. That doesn’t happen by chance.”
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