Happy face research articles get published; sad face perish. “Positive studies are exciting and potentially groundbreaking. Negative studies are not particularly exciting,” and tend not to get published in the scientific journals, a pediatrics professor explains in an editorial in one such journal.
Indeed, it’s difficult to get hold of the results of studies showing that this or that drug or class of drugs has no effect on a condition:
Current U.S. law requires that investigators submit a summary of the results of drug trials on ClinicalTrials.gov, a national registry of clinical studies. But often, researchers don’t submit their results, and the information is never published on the government website…
After all, the drug market has hundreds of millions of anti-depressant pills to sell, and, if you’re a researcher, you have a career to make.
Things only begin to get real when someone actually makes an effort to do a meta-analysis.
April 23rd, 2012 at 12:28PM
I’ll note that ‘meta-analysis’ is not a generic term in statistics– it signifies a fairly specific set of post-publication data-analysis procedures:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-analysis