Professional Development Award Update from Melissa Rethlefsen

Posted in: #CC/Academic List, #Health Interest List, #Health Sciences List, #Public/K-12 List, All Members

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Melissa Rethlefsen, Executive Director of the Health Sciences Library and Informatics Center, University of New Mexico, shares her experience attending the 9th International Congress on Peer Review and Scientific Publication conference supported by a Professional Development Award from Region 4.

The 9th International Congress on Peer Review and Scientific Publication (Peer Review Congress) was held September 8-10, 2022 in Chicago, Illinois. The founder of the first Peer Review Congress, Drummond Rennie, gave a few opening remarks at this congress; he said what they learned at the first congress was that the “literature was abysmal.” Subsequent congresses have been a mecca for those interested in improving the quality of the scientific literature, though judging from myriad presentations, literature is still pretty abysmal.

Isabelle Boutron was the first plenary speaker, kicking off the conference with a terrific talk on bias, spin, and transparency (or lack thereof) in research. She focused primarily on randomized controlled trials in the biomedical literature, and how poorly they are reported. One of her main conclusions was that evidence is not stable. Reporting, especially the reporting of harms, varies significantly between clinical study reports (the complete data from a clinical trial), ClinicalTrials.gov data, preprints, and publications, meaning that to get the complete picture of a clinical trial, all materials from that trial must be examined. She proposed finding a way to better link these materials so that all pieces about a trial would be easier to find and synthesize, because now they are fragmented.

Retractions were another major topic for the Peer Review Congress. One of my favorite talks was from Alison Avenell and colleagues, who looked at 27 retracted trials in osteoporosis and neurology (all authored by someone who admitted to fabrication) and studied how they had been cited in systematic reviews and guidelines. For example, one AHRQ systematic reviewused 7 clinical trials in their review; 6 of them were retracted. They first analyzed whether the cited retracted studies would have impacted the outcome of the systematic reviews. They then reached out to the authors of the 88 systematic reviews and guidelines they found. Only half of the authors responded to the study authors, and including the journal editor on the email to authors did not make a difference in whether they replied. Of the 88 systematic reviews, 1 publication was retracted, and 8 others published a letter or a notice, most of which were not linked to the original review. This was only 10% of reviews that the study authors believed would have substantially altered conclusions if the retracted articles weren’t included. The authors noted that it was critical for bibliographic databases to clearly not retractions so that fraudulent studies did not continue to be cited.

Benjamin Speich and colleagues discussed two different interventions to increase adherence to ten key items in the CONSORT and SPIRIT reporting guidelines. Both studies used a randomized controlled design; the intervention was to email peer reviewers to remind them to check the key ten items in CONSORT (for clinical trials) and SPIRIT (for protocols of trials). They unfortunately found that the interventions failed; there was no improvement in reporting between the intervention and control groups. It perhaps points back to one of Isabelle Boutron’s other points: too many things are expected from peer reviewers.

There were so many amazing presentations at this meeting that I cannot begin to highlight them in this short blog post! I encourage health sciences librarians to browse the #PRC9 hashtag on Twitter to find more of the exciting research presented at the Peer Review Congress.

Author Information:

Melissa L. Rethlefsen, MSLS, AHIP
Executive Director & Professor
Health Sciences Library & Informatics Center
University of New Mexico
mrethlefsen@salud.unm.edu
ORCID: 0000-0001-5322-9368 / @mlrethlefsen
she/her/hers