Several academics, doctors, and data investigators have maintained that phony or faulty studies are alarmingly common for years, according to a publication published in Nature. They have searched through RCTs in many different medical specialties, including women’s health, pain research, anesthesia, bone health, and COVID-19.
They also discovered dozens or hundreds of studies with data that appears to be statistically improbable. Some claim that the estimate of one-quarter of trials being unreliable being an underestimate based on their own personal experiences.
According to Ian Roberts, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, “if you search for all randomized trials on a topic, about a third of the trials will be fabricated.”
The problem is, in part, a subset of the well-known paper-mill problem: during the past 10 years, journals in numerous fields have published tens of thousands of suspected phony papers, some of which are believed to have been created by third-party companies, known as paper mills.
However, phony or suspect RCTs pose a particularly significant threat. In addition to being about medical procedures, they can also be elevated to respectability by being incorporated into meta-analyses and systematic reviews, which extensively scour the literature to evaluate the support for therapeutic treatments. Such evaluations are frequently cited in medical recommendations, and doctors use them to guide their patient care decisions.
[sourcelink link=”https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02299-w”]
