Healthy scepticism

The progression of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, approval of COVID-19 vaccines and roll-out of vaccination programmes has revealed a world of epidemiologists, statistical modellers and virologists who publish their ‘expert’ opinions across the media. Alternative views are also published by anti-vaxxers, usually through social media. It is a wonder that there is not more confusion among the general population with such fierce competition for the ‘truth’.

A more common problem of journal articles is publication and related biases, which may have serious consequences for sound clinical decision making. Song et al (2013) suggested that a better term might be ‘dissemination bias’. Publication and related biases include: outcome reporting, study design, time lag, full publication, grey literature, language, location, citation and media attention. These biases may be introduced intentionally or unintentionally during the process of research dissemination. Song et al (2013) highlighted how the results of many completed research studies are not published, which has been confirmed by Scherer et al's (2018) analysis of abstracts converting to full publication within 10 years. Ayorinde et al (2020) also explored publication and related biases in health services research, but the data were sparse, so they were unable to assess its magnitude or impact.