ArticleNew microbes and new infections2024
Inaccurate communication in health sciences: The case of 'partial artemisinin resistance' for the treatment of malaria.
Article in New microbes and new infections, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 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
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Malaria Prevention: Progress to Date.Drugs · 2026Review
- How a GPT-aided survey reveals a medical student's misunderstanding of the term 'artemisinin resistance'.New microbes and new infections · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Background: Accurate scientific terminology is crucial in health sciences to avoid misinterpretations. The use of 'artemisinin resistance' to describe delayed parasite clearance may be inaccurately equated with full resistance, as is typically the case when 'resistance' is used with other pathogens, leading to potential confusion. In 2018, the World Health Organization (WHO) introduced 'partial artemisinin resistance' to more accurately reflect the delayed parasite clearance observed with artemisinin-based therapies. Methods: We analyzed whether articles in PubMed accurately convey the concept of 'partial artemisinin resistance' using GPT-4 to generate related search terms. AntConc was employed for corpus analysis of retrieved articles to examine terminology in titles and abstracts. A manual review evaluated the use of the WHO concept of 'partial artemisinin resistance' in the full text of a subset of high-impact articles. Results: Out of 4041 articles retrieved, only 7 % (n = 281) used 'partial' or 'delayed' in titles or abstracts. Even after 2018, when WHO introduced the term 'partial artemisinin resistance', only 10 % of articles included this. Manual analysis of 161 full-text articles revealed that 94 % did not use 'partial artemisinin resistance', and 59 % did not explain the concept of delayed parasite clearance. Conclusion: The delayed introduction of the term 'partial artemisinin resistance' may have contributed to continued use of the scientifically questionable term 'artemisinin resistance'. This term may be misunderstood as full resistance, as is common with antibiotic resistance. Accurate terminology is essential for clear scientific communication, and precise terms should be established and consistently used from the outset by scientists and clinicians.
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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.