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 Reviews
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Bias A Cartoon Guide to Conflict of Interest Claims, Fair & Foul
Claims of conflicts of interest have been one of the – let’s call it interesting – parts of being in debates…
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Bias The Renewed Debate About Blinding in Clinical Trials
Things can go really off the rails in clinical trials. Take the most influential trial of the Mediterranean diet…
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Bias Open Badges Redux: A Few Years On, How’s the Evidence Looking?
A couple of years ago, I took shots at the way a small, uncontrolled study from 2016 of badges to encourage…
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Bias Is Gender Bias the Elephant in the “Endangered Physician-Scientist” Room?
This, in 2008: Women make up an ever-increasing fraction of the students who train to become biomedical scientists, but their…
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Bias Can Anything Really Stop the Science Spin Snowball?
With each set of hands study results pass through, there is a chance for another layer of spin to be…
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Bias Should We Trust Meta-Analyses with Meta-Conflicts of Interest?
There are a couple of angles to look at researcher conflict of interest from. One is that a conflict could distort…
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Bias A Classic Case of Science “He Said”, “She Said”: How Psychologists Trying to Prevent PTSD Got Controversial
Natural disasters have a lot in common with other major traumas, like life-threatening accidents and mass shootings – especially the emotional distress…
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Bias “True Patient Advocates Must Be Students of Evidence-Based Medicine”: An Impatient Rebuttal
Here’s the thing. If you’re a doctor who is a fervent advocate for a professional school of thought, and you feel…
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Bias Scientific Advocacy and Biases of the Ideological and Industry Kinds
I think the main thing I learned – very painfully – in 20 years as a health consumer advocate, is…
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Bias Boilover: The Cochrane HPV Vaccine Fire Isn’t Really About the Evidence – but it’s Critical to Science
It was always a volatile situation. If it blew, it was going to be even harder to keep perspective through all…
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Bias Systematic Reviews & Meta-Analyses: A 5-Step Checkup
It’s easy to be a little blinded by the specialized statistical techniques in systematic reviews and meta-analyses. As with any type…