ReviewCritical care (London, England)2025
Death by p-value: the overreliance on p-values in critical care research.
Review in Critical care (London, England), 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 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
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Development and validation of an interpretable machine learning model using routine laboratory biomarkers to stratify severe pneumonia risk in young children.Journal of advanced research · 2026Article
- Which beta-lactam infusion strategy is superior in ICU pneumonia? A Bayesian network meta-analysis of continuous, extended, and intermittent approaches.Antimicrobial agents and chemotherapy · 2026Article
- Mortality Benefit of Microaxial Flow Pump Use in Infarct-Related Cardiogenic Shock: a Bayesian Reanalysis of the DanGer Shock Trial.CJC open · 2026Article
- Development and validation of a multimodal interpretable machine learning model for the identification of osteoporosis in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus: a multicenter retrospective study.Frontiers in endocrinology · 2026Article
- Trends in the distribution of P values in epidemiology journals: a statistical, P-curve, and simulation study.American journal of epidemiology · 2025Article
- Is volatile sedation truly associated with increased mortality in mechanically ventilated critically ill adults compared to intravenous sedation? Moving beyond pairwise meta-analysis to individual agent assessment via bayesian network meta-analysis.Critical care (London, England) · 2025Article
- Bayesian methods as a complementary tool: balancing innovation and rigor in critical care research.Critical care (London, England) · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The p-value has changed from a versatile tool for scientific reasoning to a strict judge of medical information, with the usual 0.05 cutoff frequently deciding a study's significance and subsequent clinical use. Through an examination of five critical care interventions that demonstrated meaningful treatment effects yet narrowly missed conventional statistical significance, this paper illustrates how rigid adherence to p-value thresholds may obscure therapeutically beneficial findings. By providing a clear, step-by-step illustration of a basic Bayesian calculation, we demonstrate that clinical importance can remain undetected when relying solely on p-values. These observations challenge current statistical paradigms and advocate for hybrid approaches-including both frequentist and Bayesian methodologies-to provide a more comprehensive understanding of clinical data, ultimately leading to better-informed medical decisions.
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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.