On 11/8/2012 2:48 PM, Ahmed Abou-Setta, M.D. wrote:
> I am looking into the issue of ‘author bias’ especially with the
> reporting of ‘objective outcomes’ (e.g. mortality). I know that bias
> from known sources like sponsorship (e.g. pharmaceutical industry)
> has been well investigated, but about just purely ‘author bias’.
> Often authors are biased one way or another for a vast number of
> reasons including but not limited to personal beliefs of
> efficacy/effectiveness, prior observations in clinical practice, etc.
> I am looking for publications which measure or test this bias
> especially for objective outcomes since it’s much easier to bias
> subjective outcomes (e.g. pain scores) than objective ones (e.g.
> mortality) especially if the trials were randomized.
I believe you have posed an unanswerable question. If authors are
"biased one way or another," that means that the bias is inconsistent.
As such, it will be indistinguishable from pure error.
You need to have a consistent direction to assess bias. The industry
funding studies provide that direction, because authors tend to get
support from a company selling one of the drugs in the study but not
very often do they also get support from the company selling the
comparison drug.
If you're looking at a mortality study and you find an error, how would
you decide whether it was an inadvertent error versus an error caused by
conscious or unconscious biases in the researcher? You'd have to have
some indication of what that researcher's biases were, and without a
mind reader, I can't imagine how you'd do it.
You might be able to look at a more narrowly focused question, perhaps.
For example, Does a study comparing a surgical to a non-surgical outcome
tend to be biased towards the surgical outcome when the lead author is a
surgeon? You could also look at biases towards a statistically
significant effect. But "author bias" defined very generally is
impossible to pin down because you can't pin down the direction of the
bias for any individual author.
Steve Simon, [log in to unmask], Standard Disclaimer.
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