Andrew Hyde's blog

Publication bias became a big blogging topic recently as a PLoS Medicine paper was picked up by several influential sites. Lisa Bero and colleagues found that a quarter of trials submitted to the Food and Drug Administration between 2001 and 2002 in support of new drugs applications remain unpublished a year after the fact. The study also found that among the published results, unexplained discrepancies between the FDA submission and the published studies tended to lead to more favourable presentations of the drugs.

A Health in Action paper published in PLoS Medicine recently describes the success of an innovative project called inSPOT – an e-card notification system that enables people who have been diagnosed with a sexually transmitted disease to inform their sexual partners that they may also be at risk.

PLoS Medicine invited Richard Smith, former editor of the BMJ and
current board member of PLoS, to discuss an essay published this week by Neal Young, John Ioannidis and Omar Al-Ubaydli that argues that the current system of publication in biomedical research provides a distorted view of the reality of scientific data.

“Few things can make a doctor’s heart sink more in a clinic than a patient brandishing a newspaper clipping”, wrote Ben Goldacre in an article in the BMJ last year. (Especially if that clipping is from the Daily Mail, which has acquired such a reputation for dividing the world up into things that either cause or cure cancer that a blog – the Daily Mail Oncological Ontology Project – is dedicated to keeping a vigilant record).

Over the past couple of weeks Josh Eveleth and I have answered journalists’ enquiries from many different pockets of the United States about the recently published paper by Majid Ezzati and colleagues. The research, which analyzes mortality data for every county in every US state over four decades, finds a steady increase in mortality inequality across counties between 1983 and 1999.