In an editorial published this week, the PLoS Medicine editors discuss how to maintain the integrity of the medical literature when publishing comparative effectiveness research (CER).
The U.S. government has allocated US$ 1.1 billion to fund CER, which will compare the benefits and harms of different approaches to medical care. As defined in a recent Institute of Medicine report, "the purpose of CER is to assist consumers, clinicians, purchasers, and policy makers to make informed decisions that will improve health care at both the individual and population levels."
The editorial points out that in order to serve this purpose reliably, reports of CER must be transparent in their methods and objectives, and researchers must refrain from "practices that distort the scientific evidence base—such as 'cherry picking' for publication only those studies describing a desired outcome, or 'fishing' from an ocean of possible analyses only those that might support favorable (but statistically invalid) conclusions
Funding: The authors are each paid a salary by the Public Library of Science, and they wrote this editorial during their salaried time.
Competing Interests: The authors' individual competing interests are at http://www.plosmedicine.org/static/editorsInterests.action. PLoS is funded partly through manuscript publication charges, but the PLoS Medicine Editors are paid a fixed salary (their salary is not linked to the number of papers published in the journal).
Citation: The PLoS Medicine Editors (2009) Ensuring Integrity in Comparative Effectiveness Research: Accentuate the Negative. PLoS Med 6(9): e1000152. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1000152
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IN OTHER NEWS:
PLoS Medicine turns 5 years old on October 19th, 2009 which falls in Open Access week. To celebrate the journal's birthday and highlight the crucial importance of open access in medical publishing, we're holding a competition to find the best medical paper published under an open-access license anywhere (not just in PLoS) since our launch. Read more about the competition on our new community blog Speaking of Medicine, where you can also vote for the best paper. Voting closes on the 15th October, 2009. You can also vote from the PLoS Medicine homepage or the open access week website.
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PLoS Medicine is an open access, freely available international medical journal. It publishes original research that enhances our understanding of human health and disease, together with commentary and analysis of important global health issues. For more information, visit http://www.plosmedicine.org
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