ArticlePain2022
Pharmacologic therapies for neuropathic pain: an assessment of reporting biases in randomized controlled trials.
Article in Pain, 2022. 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.
- Exclusion criteria in clinical trials of treatments for neuropathic pain: a systematic analysis.Frontiers in pain research (Lausanne, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Thirty-year survey of bibliometrics used in the research literature of pain: Analysis, evolution, and pitfalls.Frontiers in pain research (Lausanne, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- Neuropathic pain; what we know and what we should do about it.Frontiers in pain research (Lausanne, Switzerland) · 2023Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
abstractSeveral different reporting biases cited in scientific literature have raised concerns about the overestimation of effects and the subsequent potential impact on the practice of evidence-based medicine and human health. Up to 7% to 8% of the population experiences neuropathic pain (NP), and established treatment guidelines are based predominantly on published clinical trial results. Therefore, we examined published randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of first-line drugs for NP and assessed the relative proportions with statistically significant (ie, positive) and nonsignificant (ie, negative) results and their rates of citation. We determined the relationships between reported study outcome and the frequency of their citations with journal impact factor, sample size, time to publication after study completion, and study quality metrics. We also examined the association of study outcome with maximum study drug dosage and conflict of interest. We found that of 107 published RCTs, 68.2% reported a statistically significant outcome regarding drug efficacy for chronic peripheral and central NP. Positive studies were cited nearly twice as often as negative studies in the literature (P = 0.01), despite similar study sample size, quality metrics, and publication in journals with similar impact factors. The time to publication, journal impact factor, and conflict of interest did not differ statistically between positive and negative studies. Our observations that negative and positive RCTs were published in journals with similar impact at comparable time-lags after study completion are encouraging. However, the citation bias for positive studies could affect the validity and generalization of conclusions in literature and potentially influence clinical practice.
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.