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The effect of journal impact factor, reporting conflicts, and reporting funding sources, on standardized effect sizes in back pain trials: a systematic review and meta-regression

BACKGROUND: Low back pain is a common and costly health complaint for which there are several moderately effective treatments. In some fields there is evidence that funder and financial conflicts are associated with trial outcomes. It is not clear whether effect sizes in back pain trials relate to j...

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Autores principales: Froud, Robert, Bjørkli, Tom, Bright, Philip, Rajendran, Dévan, Buchbinder, Rachelle, Underwood, Martin, Evans, David, Eldridge, Sandra
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2015
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4663726/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26620449
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12891-015-0825-6
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author Froud, Robert
Bjørkli, Tom
Bright, Philip
Rajendran, Dévan
Buchbinder, Rachelle
Underwood, Martin
Evans, David
Eldridge, Sandra
author_facet Froud, Robert
Bjørkli, Tom
Bright, Philip
Rajendran, Dévan
Buchbinder, Rachelle
Underwood, Martin
Evans, David
Eldridge, Sandra
author_sort Froud, Robert
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Low back pain is a common and costly health complaint for which there are several moderately effective treatments. In some fields there is evidence that funder and financial conflicts are associated with trial outcomes. It is not clear whether effect sizes in back pain trials relate to journal impact factor, reporting conflicts of interest, or reporting funding. METHODS: We performed a systematic review of English-language papers reporting randomised controlled trials of treatments for non-specific low back pain, published between 2006-2012. We modelled the relationship using 5-year journal impact factor, and categories of reported of conflicts of interest, and categories of reported funding (reported none and reported some, compared to not reporting these) using meta-regression, adjusting for sample size, and publication year. We also considered whether impact factor could be predicted by the direction of outcome, or trial sample size. RESULTS: We could abstract data to calculate effect size in 99 of 146 trials that met our inclusion criteria. Effect size is not associated with impact factor, reporting of funding source, or reporting of conflicts of interest. However, explicitly reporting ‘no trial funding’ is strongly associated with larger absolute values of effect size (adjusted β=1.02 (95 % CI 0.44 to 1.59), P=0.001). Impact factor increases by 0.008 (0.004 to 0.012) per unit increase in trial sample size (P<0.001), but does not differ by reported direction of the LBP trial outcome (P=0.270). CONCLUSIONS: The absence of associations between effect size and impact factor, reporting sources of funding, and conflicts of interest reflects positively on research and publisher conduct in the field. Strong evidence of a large association between absolute magnitude of effect size and explicit reporting of ‘no funding’ suggests authors of unfunded trials are likely to report larger effect sizes, notwithstanding direction. This could relate in part to quality, resources, and/or how pragmatic a trial is. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12891-015-0825-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
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spelling pubmed-46637262015-12-01 The effect of journal impact factor, reporting conflicts, and reporting funding sources, on standardized effect sizes in back pain trials: a systematic review and meta-regression Froud, Robert Bjørkli, Tom Bright, Philip Rajendran, Dévan Buchbinder, Rachelle Underwood, Martin Evans, David Eldridge, Sandra BMC Musculoskelet Disord Research Article BACKGROUND: Low back pain is a common and costly health complaint for which there are several moderately effective treatments. In some fields there is evidence that funder and financial conflicts are associated with trial outcomes. It is not clear whether effect sizes in back pain trials relate to journal impact factor, reporting conflicts of interest, or reporting funding. METHODS: We performed a systematic review of English-language papers reporting randomised controlled trials of treatments for non-specific low back pain, published between 2006-2012. We modelled the relationship using 5-year journal impact factor, and categories of reported of conflicts of interest, and categories of reported funding (reported none and reported some, compared to not reporting these) using meta-regression, adjusting for sample size, and publication year. We also considered whether impact factor could be predicted by the direction of outcome, or trial sample size. RESULTS: We could abstract data to calculate effect size in 99 of 146 trials that met our inclusion criteria. Effect size is not associated with impact factor, reporting of funding source, or reporting of conflicts of interest. However, explicitly reporting ‘no trial funding’ is strongly associated with larger absolute values of effect size (adjusted β=1.02 (95 % CI 0.44 to 1.59), P=0.001). Impact factor increases by 0.008 (0.004 to 0.012) per unit increase in trial sample size (P<0.001), but does not differ by reported direction of the LBP trial outcome (P=0.270). CONCLUSIONS: The absence of associations between effect size and impact factor, reporting sources of funding, and conflicts of interest reflects positively on research and publisher conduct in the field. Strong evidence of a large association between absolute magnitude of effect size and explicit reporting of ‘no funding’ suggests authors of unfunded trials are likely to report larger effect sizes, notwithstanding direction. This could relate in part to quality, resources, and/or how pragmatic a trial is. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12891-015-0825-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. BioMed Central 2015-11-30 /pmc/articles/PMC4663726/ /pubmed/26620449 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12891-015-0825-6 Text en © Froud et al. 2015 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver(http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
spellingShingle Research Article
Froud, Robert
Bjørkli, Tom
Bright, Philip
Rajendran, Dévan
Buchbinder, Rachelle
Underwood, Martin
Evans, David
Eldridge, Sandra
The effect of journal impact factor, reporting conflicts, and reporting funding sources, on standardized effect sizes in back pain trials: a systematic review and meta-regression
title The effect of journal impact factor, reporting conflicts, and reporting funding sources, on standardized effect sizes in back pain trials: a systematic review and meta-regression
title_full The effect of journal impact factor, reporting conflicts, and reporting funding sources, on standardized effect sizes in back pain trials: a systematic review and meta-regression
title_fullStr The effect of journal impact factor, reporting conflicts, and reporting funding sources, on standardized effect sizes in back pain trials: a systematic review and meta-regression
title_full_unstemmed The effect of journal impact factor, reporting conflicts, and reporting funding sources, on standardized effect sizes in back pain trials: a systematic review and meta-regression
title_short The effect of journal impact factor, reporting conflicts, and reporting funding sources, on standardized effect sizes in back pain trials: a systematic review and meta-regression
title_sort effect of journal impact factor, reporting conflicts, and reporting funding sources, on standardized effect sizes in back pain trials: a systematic review and meta-regression
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4663726/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26620449
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12891-015-0825-6
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