A detailed pre-specified protocol is supposed to be the superpower of a systematic review: its contents literally put the “systematic” into review…
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Bias Let’s Be Serious About Bias in Protocols of Systematic ReviewsRead more
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Covid-19 Reasons to Worry Less About the Explosion of PreprintsRead more
It looks as though preprints are here to stay in biomedicine, and I think that’s great. But I’ve been hearing variants of…
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Bias A Cartoon Guide to Conflict of Interest Claims, Fair & FoulRead more
Claims of conflicts of interest have been one of the – let’s call it interesting – parts of being in debates…
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Covid-19 The Limits of Those Reviews of Masks For All and What We Do KnowRead more
Have you noticed that you see so many pictures of people wearing face masks during the 1918-20 influenza pandemic, but you don’t…
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Covid-19 First in Human: Covid-19 Vaccines & Tales of Phase 1 Clinical Trials PastRead more
The people who sign up for the first-in-human trials of Covid-19 vaccines are about to do our societies an extraordinary service. Most…
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Evidence Why Do Scientists “Cite” the Top 5 Regrets of the Dying?Read more
It pops up in my Twitter feed quite often, it seems to me. A scientist will buttress their argument that academics…
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Black History Month Black History Month: Chemists’ Powerful Stories & the Sociologist Who Studied ThemRead more
It was “a large, plain white building”, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “on the banks of the Seine, opposite the Rue des…
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Evidence The High Risk Methods of a New Systematic Review of HPV VaccinesRead more
Back in 2018, the authors of a then-unpublished systematic review fired a spin- and error-laced salvo at the Cochrane review of…
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Bias The Renewed Debate About Blinding in Clinical TrialsRead more
Things can go really off the rails in clinical trials. Take the most influential trial of the Mediterranean diet…
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Annual open access roundup Open Access 2019: A Year of Momentum on the Subscription Off-RampRead more
Plan S, the open access strategy from European funders in cOAlition S, gained momentum in 2019. However it pushed…
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Listicles 5 Things We Learned About Peer Review in 2019Read more
For something so fundamental to the practice of science, it’s perplexing that it took so long for serious research into…
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Bias Open Badges Redux: A Few Years On, How’s the Evidence Looking?Read more
A couple of years ago, I took shots at the way a small, uncontrolled study from 2016 of badges to encourage…