Abstracts for reports of randomized trials of COVID-19 interventions had low quality and high spin

Abstract

Objectives : To 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 Setting : PubMed 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. Results : Forty 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). Conclusions : The 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.

Massive covidization of research citations and the citation elite

“…The present analysis shows a massive covidization of research citations during 2020- Many empirical evaluations of quality aspects of different segments of the COVID-19 scientific literature have consistently shown low quality [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. To our knowledge, there is no large-scale assessment of the correlation between quality scores (with all the difficulty of obtaining such scores) and citation impact of COVID-19 work specifically.…”

Massive covidization of research citations and the citation elite

“…Citation impact may not necessarily mean high quality or validity of the cited work. Many empirical evaluations of quality aspects of different segments of the COVID-19 scientific literature have consistently shown low quality ( 8 – 17 ). To our knowledge, there is no large-scale assessment of the correlation between quality scores (with all the difficulty of obtaining such scores) and citation impact of COVID-19 work specifically.…”

The rapid, massive growth of COVID-19 authors in the scientific literature

“…The quality of the published work was not assessed in our analysis, given the broad scope and huge diversity of the included papers. Nevertheless, many surveys of the quality of COVID-19 publications already exist [15,[25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37]. Although existing surveys of the quality of COVID-19 research do not cover all subfields of investigation and quality is often difficult to measure precisely, the consistent finding of the high prevalence of low-quality studies across very different types of study designs suggests that a large portion ( perhaps even the large majority) of the immense and rapidly growing COVID-19 literature may be of low quality.…”