8
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      Improving medical research in the United Kingdom

      letter

      Read this article at

      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          Poor quality medical research causes serious harms by misleading healthcare professionals and policymakers, decreasing trust in science and medicine, and wasting public funds. Here we outline underlying problems including insufficient transparency, dysfunctional incentives, and reporting biases. We make the following recommendations to address these problems: Journals and funders should ensure authors fulfil their obligation to share detailed study protocols, analytical code, and (as far as possible) research data. Funders and journals should incentivise uptake of registered reports and establish funding pathways which integrate evaluation of funding proposals with initial peer review of registered reports. A mandatory national register of interests for all those who are involved in medical research in the UK should be established, with an expectation that individuals maintain the accuracy of their declarations and regularly update them. Funders and institutions should stop using metrics such as citations and journal’s impact factor to assess research and researchers and instead evaluate based on quality, reproducibility, and societal value. Employers and non-academic training programmes for health professionals (clinicians hired for patient care, not to do research) should not select based on number of research publications. Promotions based on publication should be restricted to those hired to do research.

          Related collections

          Most cited references20

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: found
          • Article: found
          Is Open Access

          A manifesto for reproducible science

          Improving the reliability and efficiency of scientific research will increase the credibility of the published scientific literature and accelerate discovery. Here we argue for the adoption of measures to optimize key elements of the scientific process: methods, reporting and dissemination, reproducibility, evaluation and incentives. There is some evidence from both simulations and empirical studies supporting the likely effectiveness of these measures, but their broad adoption by researchers, institutions, funders and journals will require iterative evaluation and improvement. We discuss the goals of these measures, and how they can be implemented, in the hope that this will facilitate action toward improving the transparency, reproducibility and efficiency of scientific research.
            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: not found
            • Article: not found

            Avoidable waste in the production and reporting of research evidence.

              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: found
              • Article: not found

              Measuring the prevalence of questionable research practices with incentives for truth telling.

              Cases of clear scientific misconduct have received significant media attention recently, but less flagrantly questionable research practices may be more prevalent and, ultimately, more damaging to the academic enterprise. Using an anonymous elicitation format supplemented by incentives for honest reporting, we surveyed over 2,000 psychologists about their involvement in questionable research practices. The impact of truth-telling incentives on self-admissions of questionable research practices was positive, and this impact was greater for practices that respondents judged to be less defensible. Combining three different estimation methods, we found that the percentage of respondents who have engaged in questionable practices was surprisingly high. This finding suggests that some questionable practices may constitute the prevailing research norm.
                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Contributors
                medsbra@leeds.ac.uk
                nicholas.devito@phc.ox.ac.uk
                umkel@leeds.ac.uk
                patricia.logullo@ndorms.ox.ac.uk
                jessicabutler@abdn.ac.uk
                Journal
                BMC Res Notes
                BMC Res Notes
                BMC Research Notes
                BioMed Central (London )
                1756-0500
                13 May 2022
                13 May 2022
                2022
                : 15
                : 165
                Affiliations
                [1 ]GRID grid.9909.9, ISNI 0000 0004 1936 8403, Leeds Institute of Health Sciences, University of Leeds, ; Worsley Building, Leeds, LS2 9JT UK
                [2 ]The DataLab and Centre for Evidence Based Medicine, Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, New Radcliffe House, 2nd floor, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter,Woodstock Road, Oxford, OX2 6GG UK
                [3 ]GRID grid.4991.5, ISNI 0000 0004 1936 8948, UK EQUATOR Centre, Centre for Statistics in Medicine, , NDORMS, University of Oxford, ; Windmill Road, Oxford, OX3 7LD UK
                [4 ]GRID grid.7107.1, ISNI 0000 0004 1936 7291, Centre for Health Data Science, , University of Aberdeen, ; Aberdeen, AB25 2ZD UK
                Author information
                http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2038-2056
                http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8286-1995
                http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0420-2342
                http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8708-7003
                http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2054-3777
                Article
                6050
                10.1186/s13104-022-06050-y
                9100293
                35562775
                cc4ddc6d-45c6-48cd-bbbc-ab955a736763
                © The Author(s) 2022

                Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver ( http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

                History
                : 2 February 2022
                : 24 April 2022
                Categories
                Commentary
                Custom metadata
                © The Author(s) 2022

                Medicine
                reproducibility,research integrity,research quality,research waste,medical research,reporting biases

                Comments

                Comment on this article