A review of seventy-four clinical trials of antidepressants, for example, found that thirty-seven of thirty-eight positive studies [that praised the drugs] were published. But of the thirty-six negative studies, thirty-three were either not published or published in a form that conveyed a positive outcome.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the bias in publishing clinical trial results regarding antidepressants.
Marcia Angell's quote emphasizes the significant issue of publication bias in clinical research, specifically concerning antidepressants. It reveals that a majority of studies showing positive results are published, while negative results are often hidden or manipulated to appear favorable. This problem undermines the integrity of scientific research and can lead to misleading conclusions about the effectiveness of treatments, ultimately affecting patient care and trust in medical science.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the ethics of pharmaceutical research.
It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.
Thousands of years ago, humans domesticated every possible large wild mammal species fulfilling all those criteria and worth domesticating, with the result that there have been no valuable additions of domestic animals in recent times, despite the efforts of modern science.
If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.
A hybrid human-robot mission to investigate an asteroid affords a realistic opportunity to demonstrate new technological capabilities for future deep-space travel and to test spacecraft for long-duration spaceflight.
There are strong reasons for believing that space goes on beyond the limits of our observational horizon. There are strong reasons because if you look in opposite directions, conditions are the same to within one part in 100,000. So if we are part of some finite structure then, if the gradient is so shallow, it is likely to go on much further.
Research under a paradigm must be a particularly effective way of inducing paradigm change.
The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness.
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