ArticlePloS one2012
Why most biomedical findings echoed by newspapers turn out to be false: the case of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Article in PloS one, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Replication Validity of Initial Association Studies: A Comparison between Psychiatry, Neurology and Four Somatic Diseases.PloS one · 2016Pooled it
- Twenty-year follow-up of promising clinical studies reported in highly circulated newspapers: a meta-epidemiological study.BMJ health & care informatics · 2023Article
- ADHD diagnosis and methylphenidate consumption in children and adolescents: A systematic analysis of health databases in France over the period 2010-2019.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2022Article
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- The Digital Phenotyping Project: A Psychoanalytical and Network Theory Perspective.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- What children and young people learn about ADHD from youth information books: A text analysis of nine books on ADHD available in Dutch.Scandinavian journal of child and adolescent psychiatry and psychology · 2020Article
- What Are the Implications of Alternative Alpha Thresholds for Hypothesis Testing in Orthopaedics?Clinical orthopaedics and related research · 2019Review
- Readability of the 100 Most-Cited Neuroimaging Papers Assessed by Common Readability Formulae.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2018Article
- A biased ADHD discourse ignores human uniqueness.International journal of qualitative studies on health and well-being · 2017Article
- Heroic struggles, criminals and scientific breakthroughs: ADHD and the medicalization of child behaviour in Australian newsprint media 1999-2009.International journal of qualitative studies on health and well-being · 2017Article
- How French media have portrayed ADHD to the lay public and to social workers.International journal of qualitative studies on health and well-being · 2017Article
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- A discursive analysis concerning information on "ADHD" presented to parents by the National Institute of Mental Health (USA).International journal of qualitative studies on health and well-being · 2016Review
- Evidence-Based Practice: Separating Science From Pseudoscience.Canadian journal of psychiatry. Revue canadienne de psychiatrie · 2015Review
- Dopamine in socioecological and evolutionary perspectives: implications for psychiatric disorders.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2015Article
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- Shooting the Messenger: The Case of ADHD.Journal of contemporary psychotherapy · 2014Article
- Artificial food colour exclusion and free fatty acid supplementation may reduce symptom severity in children with ADHD.Evidence-based mental health · 2013Article
- Deep impact: unintended consequences of journal rank.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2013Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
contextBecause positive biomedical observations are more often published than those reporting no effect, initial observations are often refuted or attenuated by subsequent studies.
objectiveTo determine whether newspapers preferentially report on initial findings and whether they also report on subsequent studies.
methodsWe focused on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Using Factiva and PubMed databases, we identified 47 scientific publications on ADHD published in the 1990s and soon echoed by 347 newspapers articles. We selected the ten most echoed publications and collected all their relevant subsequent studies until 2011. We checked whether findings reported in each "top 10" publication were consistent with previous and subsequent observations. We also compared the newspaper coverage of the "top 10" publications to that of their related scientific studies.
resultsSeven of the "top 10" publications were initial studies and the conclusions in six of them were either refuted or strongly attenuated subsequently. The seventh was not confirmed or refuted, but its main conclusion appears unlikely. Among the three "top 10" that were not initial studies, two were confirmed subsequently and the third was attenuated. The newspaper coverage of the "top 10" publications (223 articles) was much larger than that of the 67 related studies (57 articles). Moreover, only one of the latter newspaper articles reported that the corresponding "top 10" finding had been attenuated. The average impact factor of the scientific journals publishing studies echoed by newspapers (17.1 n = 56) was higher (p<0.0001) than that corresponding to related publications that were not echoed (6.4 n = 56).
conclusionBecause newspapers preferentially echo initial ADHD findings appearing in prominent journals, they report on uncertain findings that are often refuted or attenuated by subsequent studies. If this media reporting bias generalizes to health sciences, it represents a major cause of distortion in health science communication.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.