All that glitters isn't gold: A survey on acknowledgment of limitations in biomedical studies

BACKGROUND: Acknowledgment of all serious limitations to research evidence is important for patient care and scientific progress. Formal research on how biomedical authors acknowledge limitations is scarce. OBJECTIVES: To assess the extent to which limitations are acknowledged in biomedical publications explicitly, and implicitly by investigating the use of phrases that express uncertainty, so-called hedges; to assess the association between industry support and the extent of hedging. DESIGN: We analyzed reporting of limitations and use of hedges in 300 biomedical publications published in 30 high and medium -ranked journals in 2007. Hedges were assessed using linguistic software that assigned weights between 1 and 5 to each expression of uncertainty. RESULTS: Twenty-seven percent of publications (81/300) did not mention any limitations, while 73% acknowledged a median of 3 (range 1-8) limitations. Five percent mentioned a limitation in the abstract. After controlling for confounders, publications on industry-supported studies used significantly fewer hedges than publications not so supported (p = 0.028). LIMITATIONS: Detection and classification of limitations was - to some extent - subjective. The weighting scheme used by the hedging detection software has subjective elements. CONCLUSIONS: Reporting of limitations in biomedical publications is probably very incomplete. Transparent reporting of limitations may protect clinicians and guideline committees against overly confident beliefs and decisions and support scientific progress through better design, conduct or analysis of new studies

Descriptives of 284 publications from medium and top tier biomedical journals used to count and classify limitations and calculate the hedging scores.

<p>Numbers are medians and (in brackets) interquartile ranges unless indicated otherwise; RCT = randomized controlled trial; Raw scores indicate the number of hedges in a publication (weighted by a hedging weight between 1 and 5); the hedging score is calculated by dividing the raw score by the number of words in (the relevant sections of) the publication. A hedging score of 3.0% indicates that on every 100 words there is one expression of uncertainty with a weight of 3 (or three with a hedging weight of 1, or less than 1, but with a hedging weight higher than 3, that is, expressing more uncertainty).</p

Results of regression analyses for the hedging scores per 100 words.

†<p>Journal differed significantly from New England Journal of Medicine (reference category).</p><p>Full adjustment was for Randomized Controlled Trial (yes/no), quality (high/non-high), sample size (6 categories), journal (28 dummies), magnitude of the P-value (3 categories).</p

Murder Ballads

Violence and murder have a strong cultural currency, the implications of which should be pursued by those with an interest in law and society, crime, and justice. Murder ballads are songs about death and killing with a history stretching back to the nineteenth century. Drawing out the major themes of this genre can help scholars gain a handle on how murder has been treated in popular culture, thereupon providing an enhanced understanding of the human condition. As an example of such examination, 2016 marked the twentieth anniversary of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Murder Ballads, their most famous and, perhaps, defining album. More than any other Bad Seeds album, Murder Ballads captures the essence of a band at its most comfortable in exploring the dark and the taboo: violence, killing, death. In producing a whole album on murder, the band left a calling card by which the wider public could define them. This article will explore the album by considering its key themes and, in so doing, reflect on the need to understand the use of murder in such popular music. The use of murder and death in popular music has not been properly studied, yet it offers potential social insight for several fields of study such as law, criminology, and psychology. In particular, little considered issues around the treatment of murder in popular culture such as humour are identified, while others that require greater attention such as attitudes to women are also given due consideratio