BMJ  2005;330:145 (15 January), doi:10.1136/bmj.330.7483.145

Letter

Users' guide to detecting misleading claims in research

Misleading claims may be symptom of even more serious flaws

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR—Montori et al justifiably draw attention to misleading claims in published clinical trials.¹ This is a serious and common problem.^{2 3} However, I object to their radical proposal that only the methods and results sections should be read, while the remainder of the paper should be ignored.

The proposal is inconsistent with the title of their paper, "Users' guide to detecting misleading claims in clinical research reports."¹ How are these misleading claims to be identified if the sections containing them are omitted? Furthermore, anyone capable of critically appraising a trial solely on the basis of the methods and results is unlikely to be fooled by misleading claims in the discussion.

But, more importantly, the proposal would deprive the discerning reader of witnessing the conflict between the results and the unwarranted conclusions. If researchers are willing to disseminate misleading claims then their integrity is brought into question. But if so, . . . [Full text of this article]

Scunthorpe General Hospital, Scunthorpe, North Lincolnshire DN15 7BH James.Penston@nig.nhs.uk

CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    StumbleUpon    Technorati    What's this?

Relevant Articles

Users' guide to detecting misleading claims in clinical research reports

Victor M Montori, Roman Jaeschke, Holger J Schünemann, Mohit Bhandari, Jan L Brozek, P J Devereaux, and Gordon H Guyatt
BMJ 2004 329: 1093-1096. [Extract] [Full Text] [PDF]

The PROGRESS trial three years later: time for a balanced report of effectiveness

Richard Wennberg and Camilla Zimmermann
BMJ 2004 329: 968-970. [Extract] [Full Text] [PDF]

Online poll

Find out more here>> and here>>