The Embassy of Good Science - User contributions [en]

Theme:5e34933a-293e-447a-9ab4-9299a152e8a5

2020-07-28T12:43:06Z

0000-0003-1804-1575:

{{Theme
|Theme Type=Good Practices
|Has Parent Theme=Theme:639528ea-d2c2-4565-8b44-15bb9646f74b
|Title=Prospective registration of clinical trials
|Is About=Trial registration is the publication of information about the design, conduct, and administration of clinical trials and should be registered before enrollment of the first participant. The information should be published on a publicly-accessible website at no charge, managed by a nonprofit organization, freely available to anybody and searchable electronically. Registration aims to 1) improve the transparency of these trials and to 2) protect stakeholder interests – including the interests of the subjects, the investigators, peer scientists and society in general.
|Important Because=Those responsible for conducting clinical trials sometimes fail in their ethical obligations towards subjects, sponsors, the scientific community and the general public by not publishing study outcomes in a timely manner. Some do not make results available at all[https://www.embassy.science/theme/prospective-registration-of-clinical-trials#_edn1 <nowiki>[i]</nowiki>]. Problems surrounding the reporting of research outcomes could lead to an erosion of trust in clinical trials. Subjects feel their contribution is not respected, harms are not adequately managed, and taxpayers feel their money is misspent. A failure to report all of the outcomes of research also slows the pace of scientific development. The regulatory policies demanding clinical trials’ registration in advance of the purposed beginning of the study aim to address and mitigate these problems.

The registration of all interventional trials is considered to be a scientific and ethical responsibility. The Declaration of Helsinki states that "Every clinical trial must be registered in a publicly accessible database before recruitment of the first subject". The trials registration offers the following advantages: 1) ensure global access to scientific data;2) prevent unnecessary duplications, informing about similar or identical trials and therefore saving public resources;3) offer to patients the possibility of being recruited in an experimental study;4) facilitate the identification of publication bias and selective reporting;5) allow investigators to increase the quality of research design;6) support international scientific cooperation by enabling researchers and health care practitioners to identify trials in which they may have an interest; and 7) reduce the tendency to under-report negative findings.<ref>WHO Statement on Public Disclosure of Clinical Trial Results. 2017. Available from:https://www.who.int/ictrp/trial_reg/en/. Accessed May 2019.</ref>
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|Important For=PhD students; Early career researchers; Junior researchers; Senior researchers; Funders; Research performing organisations; Research funding organisations
|Has Best Practice=In 2004, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) announced that clinical trials beginning after July 1, 2005, would be under a new trial registration policy. <ref>International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. Clinical Trial RegistrationAvailable from: [http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/publishing-and-editorial-issues/clinical-trial-registration.html www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/publishing-and-editorial-issues/clinical-trial-registration.html] Accessed May 2019.</ref> To be published in member journals, the trials would have to be registered in an approved trial registry prior to the enrollment of the first participant. Since 2005, ICMJE has reiterated that registering a prospective study should be a condition of publication and after the announcement, several journals endorsed this policy. The registration must occur prior to enrollment of the first study participant in a trial registry that meets the quality criteria developed by WHO. <ref>WHO Statement on Public Disclosure of Clinical Trial Results. 2017. Available from: https://www.who.int/ictrp/en/ Accessed May 2019.</ref>However, the adherence for this requirement remains low by both researchers and journal editors and, unfortunately, not all clinical trials are registered before they start.

Recent findings suggest that among the reasons that lead to the low adherence to the new requirement by the researchers are: lack of awareness of the criteria; misunderstandings regarding the definition of clinical trial by ICMJE; and difficulties for registration. <ref>Loder E, Loder S, Cook S. Characteristics and publication fate of unregistered and retrospectively registered clinical trials submitted to The BMJ over 4 years. BMJ Open2018;8:e020037. doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2017-020037</ref>On the part of journal editors, the main reason is that not all journals are equally committed to meeting the registration requirements, strengths, and limitations of the study. The Committee on Publication Ethics suggested that “it is probably best to judge each paper on a case by case basis.”
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|Related To Resource=Resource:08657792-f22e-486e-a034-c78fb9a2f39f;Resource:E273cee3-0907-4841-9126-9cee08518338
|Related To Theme=Theme:24e87492-7020-4fc0-ab37-dd88bcf9f637;Theme:0bb5e4f7-9336-4ca8-92e3-c506413d1450
}}
{{Tags
|Has Virtue And Value=Accountability
|Has Good Practice And Misconduct=Clinical trials
}}

Resource:8d1cf090-4db3-4305-a869-4604d8f56b45

2020-07-28T09:53:03Z

0000-0003-1804-1575:

{{Resource
|Resource Type=Education
|Title=A comparison of online versus on-site training in health research methodology: a randomized study
|Is About=In this randomized study, authors measured Biostatistics and Research Ethics online course knowledge, compared to traditional on-site training of the same course. Online and on-site training formats led to marked and similar improvements of knowledge in Biostatistics and Research Ethics.
|Important For=All stakeholders in research
}}
{{Link
|Has Link=https://bmcmededuc.biomedcentral.com/track/pdf/10.1186/1472-6920-11-37
}}
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{{Tags
|Involves=Aggarval; Gupte; Kass; Taylor; Ali; Bhan
|Has Timepoint=2011
|Has Location=India
|Has Virtue And Value=Honesty
|Has Good Practice And Misconduct=Research ethics
|Related To Research Area=LS - Life Sciences
}}

Theme:B84659ea-3fc8-4c93-86cf-6aa4db253ad4

2020-07-28T09:48:13Z

0000-0003-1804-1575:

{{Theme
|Theme Type=Good Practices
|Has Parent Theme=Theme:8453f98b-244e-4147-9268-504afbe9d878
|Title=Altmetrics
|Is About=Altmetrics is an alternative, online based approach to research metrics, as opposed to traditional ones, such as h-index or impact factor.
|Important Because=Ever since its invention, the Internet has become an omnipresent part of everyday communication. It has become common in science to share your articles via Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. Measuring that part of online impact is important as it offers different insight into popularity and use of published articles.
|Important For=PhD students; Scientists; All stakeholders in research; Supervisors; Postdocs; Research performing organisations; Research funding organisations; Journals; Editors; Junior researchers; Senior researchers
|Has Best Practice=There are different online companies offering altmetrics services. Some of them are Altmetric, Impactstory, and Plum Analytics.<ref>Piwowar H. Altmetrics: Value all research products. Nature. 2013;493(7431).</ref> They can track HTML views and PDF downloads, shared articles on social media platforms, saved and cited items. Altmetrics scores are often indicators of how popular an article is online with the general public. Unlike typical research metrics, Altmetrics software enables the user to track the dissemination of publications in real time. Some publishers have started offering their readers this information (BioMed Central, PLOS, Nature, Elsevier). Some argue that this form of metric is not a good indicator of popularity or quality, as social media activity and time of publication can have a big influence on the metric. <ref>Eysenbach G. Can tweets predict citations? Metrics of social impact based on Twitter and correlation with traditional metrics of scientific impact. J Med Internet Res. 2011;13(4).</ref> There seems to be no correlation between citations and altmetrics.
<references />
|Has Reference=a
}}
{{Related To
|Related To Resource=Resource:8be5a9b1-1c66-4659-b175-ca1e8df61047
|Related To Theme=Theme:8453f98b-244e-4147-9268-504afbe9d878;Theme:B84659ea-3fc8-4c93-86cf-6aa4db253ad4
}}
{{Tags
|Has Virtue And Value=Reliability; Accountability
|Has Good Practice And Misconduct=Institutional responsibilities; Funders’ responsibilities; Publication ethics; Grant applications; Science policy; Perverse incentives; Altmetrics
}}

Theme:B84659ea-3fc8-4c93-86cf-6aa4db253ad4

2020-07-28T09:38:55Z

0000-0003-1804-1575:

{{Theme
|Theme Type=Good Practices
|Has Parent Theme=Theme:8453f98b-244e-4147-9268-504afbe9d878
|Title=Altmetrics
|Is About=Altmetrics is an alternative, online based approach to research metrics, as opposed to traditional ones, such as h-index or impact factor.
|Important Because=Ever since its invention, the Internet has become an omnipresent part of everyday communication. It has become common in science to share your articles via Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. Measuring that part of online impact is important as it offers different insight into popularity and use of published articles.
|Important For=PhD students; Scientists; All stakeholders in research; Supervisors; Postdocs; Research performing organisations; Research funding organisations; Journals; Editors; Junior researchers; Senior researchers
|Has Best Practice=There are different online companies offering altmetrics services. Some of them are Altmetric, Impactstory, and Plum Analytics.<ref>Piwowar H. Altmetrics: Value all research products. Nature. 2013;493(7431).</ref> They can track HTML views and PDF downloads, shared articles on social media platforms, saved and cited items. Altmetrics scores are often indicators of how popular an article is online, with the general public. Unlike typical research metrics, Altmetrics software enables the user to track the dissemination of publications in real time. Some publishers have started offering their readers this information (BioMed Central, PLOS, Nature, Elsevier). Some argue that this form of metric is not a good indicator of popularity or quality, as social media activity and time of publication can have a big influence on the metric. <ref>Eysenbach G. Can tweets predict citations? Metrics of social impact based on Twitter and correlation with traditional metrics of scientific impact. J Med Internet Res. 2011;13(4).</ref> There seems to be no correlation between citations and altmetrics.
<references />
|Has Reference=a
}}
{{Related To
|Related To Resource=Resource:8be5a9b1-1c66-4659-b175-ca1e8df61047
|Related To Theme=Theme:8453f98b-244e-4147-9268-504afbe9d878;Theme:B84659ea-3fc8-4c93-86cf-6aa4db253ad4
}}
{{Tags
|Has Virtue And Value=Reliability; Accountability
|Has Good Practice And Misconduct=Institutional responsibilities; Funders’ responsibilities; Publication ethics; Grant applications; Science policy; Perverse incentives; Altmetrics
}}

Theme:6b584d4e-2c9d-4e27-b370-5fbdb983ab46

2020-07-28T09:26:50Z

0000-0003-1804-1575:

{{Theme
|Theme Type=Misconduct & Misbehaviors
|Has Parent Theme=Theme:883697c8-d319-4224-991e-ce063d648efd
|Title=P-value hacking
|Is About=P-value hacking, also known as data dredging, data fishing, data snooping or data butchery, is an exploitation of data analysis in order to discover patterns which would be presented as statistically significant, when in reality, there is no underlying effect . <ref>Head ML, Holman L, Lanfear R, Kahn AT, Jennions MD. The extent and consequences of p-hacking in science. PLoS Biol. 2015;13(3).</ref> <ref>Norman G. Data dredging, salami-slicing, and other successful strategies to ensure rejection: twelve tips on how to not get your paper published: Adv Health Sci Educ Theory Pract. 2014 Mar;19(1):1-5. doi: 10.1007/s10459-014-9494-8.</ref>In other words, p-hacking is running statistical tests on a set of data until some statistically significant results arise. That can be done in a few different ways, for example: by stopping the collection of data once you get a P<0.05, analyzing many outcomes, but only reporting those with P<0.05, using covariates, excluding participants, etc.
<references />
|Important Because=Unfortunately, current practices in science show that journals that are considered of high quality (those with high impact factors) predominately publish statistically significant results. Researchers want to publish in such journals because it's important for their academic prestige and job. <ref>Ekmekci PE. An increasing problem in publication ethics: Publication bias and editors' role in avoiding it. Med Health Care Philos. 2017;20(2):171-8.</ref> This creates pressure on researchers, and can lead to P-value hacking. P-value hacking leads to false positive results, which can get published, and have a negative impact on future research in the field, secondary research and systematic reviews and human knowledge in general. <ref>Dwan K, Altman DG, Arnaiz JA, Bloom J, Chan AW, Cronin E, et al. Systematic review of the empirical evidence of study publication bias and outcome reporting bias. PLoS One. 2008;3(8):0003081.</ref>
<references />
|Important For=Students; PhD Students; Scientists; Researchers; Supervisors; Postdocs; Journal editors; Junior researchers; Senior researchers
|Has Best Practice=It’s difficult to address the issue of P-value hacking, especially since there aren’t many incentives to replicate research. However, some steps can be taken in order to prevent it. Cross-validation, or out-of-sample testing is a statistical method used to create two sets of data. The first set of data is then used for statistical analysis, to develop new models or hypotheses, and the other, independent set is then used to verify them. <ref>Berk R, Brown L, Zhao L. Statistical Inference After Model Selection. Journal of Quantitative Criminology. 2010;26(2):217-36.</ref>A number of statistical analyses is also available to check for p-value hacking, such as Bonferonni correction, Scheffé's method and false discovery rate. A lot of journals will now ask for raw data to be published, or shift their way of work to registered report format. That is a publication process in which journals accept the publications based on theoretical justification and methodology only, without looking at results. <ref>Simons DJ, Holcombe AO, Spellman BA. An Introduction to Registered Replication Reports at Perspectives on Psychological Science. Perspect Psychol Sci. 2014;9(5):552-5.</ref>
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}}
{{Related To
|Related To Resource=Resource:8354ff67-9da4-4325-8395-d16e30059fb2;Resource:226c89f1-a061-4bb0-8ec4-79583de2ddf0;Resource:47bfd883-c518-4a97-98fb-86b5cf442d3e
|Related To Theme=Theme:24e87492-7020-4fc0-ab37-dd88bcf9f637;Theme:88b73549-fec0-4fb9-99f6-fe1055d6b76a
}}
{{Tags
|Has Virtue And Value=Reliability
|Has Good Practice And Misconduct=Questionable research practice
}}

Theme:Ed7ce22e-667a-44a8-a3d0-2abdd0d37b1a

2020-07-28T09:18:36Z

0000-0003-1804-1575:

{{Theme
|Theme Type=Misconduct & Misbehaviors
|Has Parent Theme=Theme:883697c8-d319-4224-991e-ce063d648efd
|Title=Self-plagiarism
|Is About=Self-plagiarism is the practice of reusing significant parts of one’s own publication in another publication. Self-plagiarism is also known as duplicate (or multiple) publishing. Keep in mind that self-plagiarism is different from duplicate submission. <ref>Thurman RH, Chervenak FA, McCullough LB, Halwani S, Farine D. Self-plagiarism: a misnomer. Am J Obstet Gynecol. 2016;214(1):91-3.</ref>
<references />
|Important Because=Self-plagiarism is an issue because it means already published data is presented as new, which can distort meta-analyses and impact review articles. Not only that, duplicate publishing can have serious effects on algorithms and guidelines in healthcare. Self-plagiarism gives false results in citation index tools. It’s unfair and at its core, it’s basically double dipping - for one piece of work you get multiple publications. Another problem is the copyright issue. When you publish your work, you usually sign a contract with the journal, by which you transfer copyright rights to the publisher. That way, when you copy your own work, you are stealing not only from yourself, but from the publisher as well, and actually breaking the law.
|Important For=Students; PhD Students; Scientists; Researchers; Supervisors; Postdocs; Journal editors; Reviewers
|Has Best Practice=Different fields take different stances in regard to self-plagiarism. For example, legal research has a lot more tolerance for reuse of one's work than biomedical science. In 1969, the scientific journal the “New England Journal of Medicine” announced they would no longer publish already published work. This is called Ingelfinger rule and became a norm for high quality scientific journals. <ref>Altman LK. The Ingelfinger rule, embargoes, and journal peer review--Part 1. Lancet. 1996;347(9012):1382-6.</ref> Because of the rise of preprint servers (such as arXiv), journals now tend to loosen that policy. Secondary publications are a different issue, as they clearly state that work has been previously published. They are produced with a goal of reaching a bigger (and sometimes different) audience, often through translations to different languages.

Keep in mind that a lot of scientific journals use computer software to check if your text is similar to anything already published. The majority of software works through screening available online databases for similarities. <ref>Errami M, Sun Z, Long TC, George AC, Garner HR. Deja vu: a database of highly similar citations in the scientific literature. Nucleic Acids Res. 2009;37(Database issue</ref>
<references />
}}
{{Related To
|Related To Resource=Resource:Fa937813-9987-4ceb-a69e-373cc876e476;Resource:8354ff67-9da4-4325-8395-d16e30059fb2
|Related To Theme=Theme:02592695-e4f8-473c-a944-adfe0d8094c0;Theme:95c69cce-596a-42b5-9d86-e0aabaf00a85;Theme:4d29ae67-bee8-4203-b78f-320bc63025d0
}}
{{Tags
|Has Virtue And Value=Honesty
|Has Good Practice And Misconduct=Plagiarism; Research misconduct
}}

Theme:Ed7ce22e-667a-44a8-a3d0-2abdd0d37b1a

2020-07-28T09:16:38Z

0000-0003-1804-1575:

{{Theme
|Theme Type=Misconduct & Misbehaviors
|Has Parent Theme=Theme:883697c8-d319-4224-991e-ce063d648efd
|Title=Self-plagiarism
|Is About=Self-plagiarism is the practice of reusing significant parts of one’s own publication in another publication. Self-plagiarism is also known as duplicate (or multiple) publishing. Keep in mind that self-plagiarism is different from duplicate submission. <ref>Thurman RH, Chervenak FA, McCullough LB, Halwani S, Farine D. Self-plagiarism: a misnomer. Am J Obstet Gynecol. 2016;214(1):91-3.</ref>
<references />
|Important Because=Self-plagiarism is an issue because it means already published data is presented as new, which can distort meta-analyses and impact review articles. Not only that, duplicate publishing can have serious effects on algorithms and guidelines in healthcare. Self-plagiarism gives false results in citation index tools. It’s unfair and at its core, it’s basically double dipping - for one piece of work you get multiple publications. Another problem is the copyright issue. When you publish your work, you usually sign a contract with the journal, by which you transfer copyright rights to the publisher. That way, when you copy your own work, you are stealing not only from yourself, but from the publisher as well, and actually breaking the law.
|Important For=Students; PhD Students; Scientists; Researchers; Supervisors; Postdocs; Journal editors; Reviewers
|Has Best Practice=Different fields take different stances in regard to self-plagiarism. For example, legal research has a lot more tolerance for reuse of ones’ work than biomedical science. In 1969, the scientific journal the “New England Journal of Medicine” announced they would no longer publish already published work. This is called Ingelfinger rule and became a norm for high quality scientific journals. <ref>Altman LK. The Ingelfinger rule, embargoes, and journal peer review--Part 1. Lancet. 1996;347(9012):1382-6.</ref> Because of the rise of preprint servers (such as arXiv), journals now tend to loosen that policy. Secondary publications are a different issue, as they clearly state that work has been previously published. They are produced with a goal of a reaching bigger (and sometimes different) audience, often through translations to different languages.

Keep in mind that a lot of scientific journals use computer software to check if your text is similar to anything already published. The majority of software works through screening available online databases for similarities. <ref>Errami M, Sun Z, Long TC, George AC, Garner HR. Deja vu: a database of highly similar citations in the scientific literature. Nucleic Acids Res. 2009;37(Database issue</ref>
<references />
}}
{{Related To
|Related To Resource=Resource:Fa937813-9987-4ceb-a69e-373cc876e476;Resource:8354ff67-9da4-4325-8395-d16e30059fb2
|Related To Theme=Theme:02592695-e4f8-473c-a944-adfe0d8094c0;Theme:95c69cce-596a-42b5-9d86-e0aabaf00a85;Theme:4d29ae67-bee8-4203-b78f-320bc63025d0
}}
{{Tags
|Has Virtue And Value=Honesty
|Has Good Practice And Misconduct=Plagiarism; Research misconduct
}}

Theme:B84659ea-3fc8-4c93-86cf-6aa4db253ad4

2020-07-28T09:07:54Z

0000-0003-1804-1575:

{{Theme
|Theme Type=Good Practices
|Has Parent Theme=Theme:8453f98b-244e-4147-9268-504afbe9d878
|Title=Altmetrics
|Is About=Altmetrics is an alternative, online based approach to research metrics, as opposed to traditional ones, such as h-index or impact factor.
|Important Because=Ever since its invention, the Internet has become an omnipresent part of everyday communication. It has become common in science to share your articles via Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. Measuring that part of online impact is important as it offers different insight into popularity and use of published articles.
|Important For=PhD students; Scientists; All stakeholders in research; Supervisors; Postdocs; Research performing organisations; Research funding organisations; Journals; Editors; Junior researchers; Senior researchers
|Has Best Practice=There are different online companies offering altmetrics services. Some of them are Altmetric, Impactstory, and Plum Analytics.<ref>Piwowar H. Altmetrics: Value all research products. Nature. 2013;493(7431).</ref> They can track HTML views and PDF downloads, shared articles on social media platforms, saved and cited items. Altmetrics scores are often indicators of how popular an article is online, with the general public. Unlike typical research metrics, Altmetrics software enables the user to track the dissemination of publications in real time. Some publishers have started offering their readers this information (BioMed Central, PLOS, Nature, Elsevier). Some argue that this form of metric is not a good indicator of popularity or quality, as social media activity and time of publication can have a big influence on the metric. <ref>Eysenbach G. Can tweets predict citations? Metrics of social impact based on Twitter and correlation with traditional metrics of scientific impact. J Med Internet Res. 2011;13(4).</ref> There seems to be no correlations between citations and altmetrics.
<references />
|Has Reference=a
}}
{{Related To
|Related To Resource=Resource:8be5a9b1-1c66-4659-b175-ca1e8df61047
|Related To Theme=Theme:8453f98b-244e-4147-9268-504afbe9d878;Theme:B84659ea-3fc8-4c93-86cf-6aa4db253ad4
}}
{{Tags
|Has Virtue And Value=Reliability; Accountability
|Has Good Practice And Misconduct=Institutional responsibilities; Funders’ responsibilities; Publication ethics; Grant applications; Science policy; Perverse incentives; Altmetrics
}}

User:0000-0003-1804-1575

2020-07-28T08:56:03Z

0000-0003-1804-1575: create user page