Tag: research bias

About half of the large antidepressant trials are biased enough to be considered “seeding trials,” according to the researchers.

Drug regulators frequently approve drugs despite contradictory clinical trial results and without evidence of clinical benefits.

Leading researchers point out that a new antidepressant study in NEJM failed to account for withdrawal symptoms, casting doubt on the results.

A new study investigates how antidepressant withdrawal effects often get confounded with depression relapse in clinical trials.

A new article in Lancet Psychiatry debunks past studies claiming that those on low doses of antipsychotics are more likely to relapse.

Discussing informed consent, risk/benefit ratios, and the many sources of bias in clinical trials for drugs, in order to help the layperson better understand the research.

Debunking a recent study on ADHD and COVID-19: It suffers from a series of manipulations and spins that are inappropriate in scientific research that aspires to objectivity and that aims to reveal truths.

A new study demonstrates how the choice of statistical techniques when examining data plays a large role in scientific outcomes.

A discourse analysis conducted by sociologists finds problematic assumptions and practices in the field of neurocriminology.

Scientists at the Yale Collaboration for Research Integrity and Transparency (CRIT) published a new policy paper this month criticizing the current state of biomedical research and calling for improved transparency in research methods.

Contrary to popular belief, science is not immune to the corrupting influences of the society it operates in. When false results produced by p-hacked research have social, scientific, and political importance, and affect or harm the lives of millions of people while entire fields look on, it constitutes a scientific scandal.

From the New Scientist: “Paul Smaldino and Richard McElreath at the University of California Davis used an evolutionary theory-based computational model to analyse the problem of bad...

In December, MIA  reported on a systematic Cochrane review on the research for the safety and effectiveness of Ritalin (methylphenidate) that found substantial bias...

The Watchdogs cover a new paper, titled “The Natural Selection of Bad Science.” The researchers write that “some of the most powerful incentives in...

A study, comparing the effects of antidepressants combined with psychotherapy for severe depression to antidepressants alone, has been retracted and replaced by JAMA Psychiatry....

For The Week, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry comments on the current state of Science: the replicability crisis, the failure to self-correct, outright fraud, the inadequacy of...

William A. Wilson presents shocking evidence that a lot of published research is false and that science’s self-correcting mechanisms are broken. “There is no...

“The ‘file drawer problem’ refers to the fact that in science, many results remain unpublished – especially negative ones,” Neuroskeptic reports. A new paper...

Emma Granqvist is leading the push for open access journals, like New Negatives in Plant Science, which are platforms for negative, unexpected or controversial results in...

"After making an observation and forming a hypothesis as usual, the new third step of the scientific method will now require researchers to embark upon an exhaustive search for corporate or government financing,” the satirical news site the Onion “reports.” “Next, scientists simply modify their study’s goals to align with the vision of potential funders and wait for several months to hear back. At this point—should this step be successful, of course—they can move on to the experimental stage, and then to analysis.”

A massive number of meta-analyses of antidepressant clinical trials have financial conflicts of interest and are unduly influenced by pharmaceutical companies, according to a review to be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology. Researchers also found that meta-analyses with industry ties almost never report any negative findings in their abstracts.