Trial reportPloS one2023
A randomised controlled trial of email versus mailed invitation letter in a national longitudinal survey of physicians.
Trial report in PloS one, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 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
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Hospital-Based Clinicians' Knowledge and Practices Regarding Stigmatizing Language in Clinical Documentation: A Multicenter Survey.Journal of general internal medicine · 2026Article
- Design and Performance of an Email-Based Patient Recruitment Campaign in Primary Care Research: Formative Secondary Analysis.JMIR human factors · 2026Article
- Participation Rates in 11 National Dental Practice-Based Research Network Surveys 2014-2022.Evaluation & the health professions · 2025Article
- A Teach-the-Teacher Module for Human Trafficking Bedside Instruction.MedEdPORTAL : the journal of teaching and learning resources · 2024Article
- Reporting Practices and Methodological Challenges in Anesthesiology Program Director Surveys: A Scoping Review.The journal of education in perioperative medicine : JEPMArticle
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
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Despite their low cost, the use of email invitations to distribute surveys to medical practitioners have been associated with lower response rates. This research compares the difference in response rates from using email approach plus online completion rather than a mailed invitation letter plus a choice of online or paper completion. A parallel randomised controlled trial was conducted during the 11th annual wave of the nationally representative Medicine in Australia: Balancing Employment and Life (MABEL) longitudinal survey of doctors. The control group was invited using a mailed paper letter (including a paper survey plus instructions to complete online) and three mailed paper reminders. The intervention group was approached in the same way apart from the second reminder when they were approached by email only. The primary outcome is the response rate and the statistical analysis was blinded. 18,247 doctors were randomly allocated to the control (9,125) or intervention group (9,127), with 9,108 and 9,107 included in the analysis. Using intention to treat analysis, the response rate in the intervention group was 35.92% compared to 37.59% in the control group, a difference of -1.66 percentage points (95% CI: -3.06 to -0.26). The difference was larger for General Practitioners (-2.76 percentage points, 95% CI: -4.65 to -0.87) compared to other specialists (-0.47 percentage points, 95% CI: -2.53 to 1.60). For those who supplied an email address, the average treatment effect on the treated was higher at -2.63 percentage points (95% CI: -4.50 to -0.75) for all physicians, -3.17 percentage points (95% CI: -5.83 to -0.53) for General Practitioners, and -2.1 percentage points (95% CI: -4.75 to 0.56) for other specialists. For qualified physicians, using email to invite participants to complete a survey leads to lower response rates compared to a mailed letter. Lower response rates need to be traded off with the lower costs of using email rather than mailed letters.
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.