ArticleJournal of clinical epidemiology2021
Abstracts for reports of randomised trials of COVID-19 interventions had low quality and high spin.
Article in Journal of clinical epidemiology, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- A scoping review of randomized controlled trials in the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic: country-level research response to COVID-19 therapeutics and vaccines.BMC infectious diseases · 2026Article
- Assessment of Noninferiority Margins in Cardiovascular Medicine Trials.JACC. Advances · 2024Article
- The importance of meta-research in dentistry.Evidence-based dentistry · 2023Article
- Article
- Article
- Massive covidization of research citations and the citation elite.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- A Synthesis of the Formats for Correcting Erroneous and Fraudulent Academic Literature, and Associated Challenges.Journal for general philosophy of science = Zeitschrift fur allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie · 2022Article
- The rapid, massive growth of COVID-19 authors in the scientific literature.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
10 authors.
Funding
Abstract
objectivesTo assess the reporting quality of abstracts for published randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of interventions for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), including the use of spin strategies and the level of spin for RCTs with statistically non-significant primary outcomes, and to explore potential predictors for reporting quality and the severity of spin. STUDY DESIGN AND
settingPubMed was searched to find RCTs that tested interventions for COVID-19, and the reporting quality and spin in the abstracts were assessed. Linear regression analyses were used to identify potential predictors.
resultsForty RCT abstracts were included in our assessment of reporting quality, and a higher word count in the abstract was significantly correlated with higher reporting scores (95% CI 0.044 to 0.658, P=0.026). Multiple spin strategies were identified. Our multivariate analyses showed that geographical origin was associated with severity of spin, with research from non-Asian regions containing fewer spin strategies (95% CI -0.760 to -0.099, P=0.013).
conclusionsThe reporting quality of abstracts of RCTs of interventions for COVID-19 is far from satisfactory. A relatively high proportion of the abstracts contained spin, and the findings reported in the results and conclusion sections of these abstracts need to be interpreted with caution.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What Socratic holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.