Transparent and accurate reporting increases reliability, utility, and impact of your research: reporting guidelines and the EQUATOR Network

Although current electronic methods of scientific publishing offer increased opportunities for publishing all research studies and describing them in sufficient detail, health research literature still suffers from many shortcomings. These shortcomings seriously undermine the value and utility of the literature and waste scarce resources invested in the research. In recent years there have been several positive steps aimed at improving this situation, such as a strengthening of journals' policies on research publication and the wide requirement to register clinical trials

CONSORT 2010 Statement: Updated Guidelines for Reporting Parallel Group Randomised Trials

Kenneth Schulz and colleagues describe the 2010 version of the CONSORT Statement, which updates the previous reporting guideline based on new methodological evidence and accumulated experience

The construction of marketing measures: the case of viewability

This study seeks to develop a critical understanding of marketing measures. Marketing measures inform a variety of marketing practices and have been subject to ethical, discursive and epistemological critique. Informed by a range of theoretical work, this study sheds light on the construction of a key marketing measure in digital advertising: viewability. It shows how a range of competing interests can be mobilized and aligned; how an object of interest can be stabilized; and how standards for measurement can be reconciled. Across this account, we can see how issues of accuracy, ideology and ethics are bracketed off as participants agree on which things matter and which things count

Distribution of Country of Origin in Studies Used in Cochrane Reviews

Inclusion in systematic reviews is one important component in judging the potential impact of clinical studies upon practice and hence the 'value for money' of spending for clinical research. This study aims to quantify the distribution of countries of origin of clinical studies used in Cochrane Reviews (CRs), and to link these data to the size of a country and to its spending on research. Random sample of publications used for CRs published in Issue 1 2008 and of publications used in CRs in the field of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). Publications without original data were excluded. Likely countries of origin determined based on abstracts/full texts. CIA World Factbook (population data) and OECD database (economic data) were used. 1,000 random entries out of 140,005 references available in all specialities. In 876 (91.4%) of 959 eligible studies, country of origin was determined. The USA was the leading contributor (36.0% of the studies), followed by UK (13.4%), Canada (5.3%), Australia and Sweden (3.7%). In the CAM sample, country of origin was determined in 458 (93.5%) of 497 assessed studies. Again, the USA was the leading contributor (24.9%), with China also emerging as a significant contributor (24.7%) in this field. For both samples, the contribution of smaller countries (especially Scandinavian countries, Greece, and Ireland) became more noteworthy when considered in relation to population size and research spending. Our results support the leading roles of both the USA and the UK in publishing clinical papers. The emerging role of China can be seen, particularly related to CAM studies. Taking into account size of population and economic power, countries like France, Germany, Italy, and Spain provide small contributions. In contrast, smaller countries like Australia, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, New Zealand, and Sweden also play major roles

Helping editors, peer reviewers and authors improve the clarity, completeness and transparency of reporting health research

Inadequate reporting is problematic for several reasons. If authors do not provide sufficient details concerning the conduct of their study, readers are left with an incomplete picture of what was done. As such, they are not able to judge the merits of the results and interpret them. The EQUATOR Network is a new initiative aimed at improving the clarity and transparency of reporting health research

A comprehensive 1000 Genomes-based genome-wide association meta-analysis of coronary artery disease

Existing knowledge of genetic variants affecting risk of coronary artery disease (CAD) is largely based on genome-wide association studies (GWAS) analysis of common SNPs. Leveraging phased haplotypes from the 1000 Genomes Project, we report a GWAS meta-analysis of 185 thousand CAD cases and controls, interrogating 6.7 million common (MAF>0.05) as well as 2.7 million low frequency (0.005<MAF<0.05) variants. In addition to confirmation of most known CAD loci, we identified 10 novel loci, eight additive and two recessive, that contain candidate genes that newly implicate biological processes in vessel walls. We observed intra-locus allelic heterogeneity but little evidence of low frequency variants with larger effects and no evidence of synthetic association. Our analysis provides a comprehensive survey of the fine genetic architecture of CAD showing that genetic susceptibility to this common disease is largely determined by common SNPs of small effect siz