ArticleBMJ open2019
Examination of CIs in health and medical journals from 1976 to 2019: an observational study.
Article in BMJ open, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Evidence of questionable research practices in clinical prediction models.BMC medicine · 2023Article
- Climate change and infectious disease: a review of evidence and research trends.Infectious diseases of poverty · 2023Review
- Helping reviewers assess statistical analysis: A case study from analytic methods.Analytical science advances · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectivesPrevious research has shown clear biases in the distribution of published p values, with an excess below the 0.05 threshold due to a combination of p-hacking and publication bias. We aimed to examine the bias for statistical significance using published confidence intervals.
designObservational study.
settingPapers published in
participantsOver 968 000 confidence intervals extracted from abstracts and over 350 000 intervals extracted from the full-text. OUTCOME MEASURES: Cumulative distributions of lower and upper confidence interval limits for ratio estimates.
resultsWe found an excess of statistically significant results with a glut of lower intervals just above one and upper intervals just below 1. These excesses have not improved in recent years. The excesses did not appear in a set of over 100 000 confidence intervals that were not subject to p-hacking or publication bias.
conclusionsThe huge excesses of published confidence intervals that are just below the statistically significant threshold are not statistically plausible. Large improvements in research practice are needed to provide more results that better reflect the truth.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.