More research is not needed


Try typing the search term "more research is needed" (with the quote marks) into PubMed:  
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?db=pubmed. You should get over 62,000 hits, and that's only for papers which have the phrase in their abstract. Countless more will have it buried in the discussion section of the full text. In fact, it would be interesting to know which papers don't advocate carrying out further research. 

To be fair, sometimes this conclusion may be appropriate. More research is needed if one reports an equivocal result or a finding which is unexpectedly negative or unexpectedly positive. More research is needed if insufficient information has been obtained in order to come to a reasonable conclusion as to what clinical interventions may be appropriate or what theoretical insights have been gained. More research is needed if one has obtained a positive result but its exact implications require further clarification. 

However more research is not needed if a hypothesis has been tested using a reasonable methodology and an adequate sample size and the conclusion is pretty much in line with what a prior understanding of the field might have predicted.  

Typically, if one group has reported a weakly significant finding from a genetic association study and a follow-up study in a large sample is negative then the people reporting the negative study do not have to say that "more research is needed". They can just say they failed to replicate the result and everybody can move on.  

If trials of complementary therapy are negative then it does not mean that "more research Is needed". It means that the complementary therapy probably doesn't do any good. 

Take a look at this site discussing complementary therapies for asthma: http://www.asthma.org.uk/about-asthma/medicines-treatments/complementary-therapies/ 

Note this phrase in the introduction (my italics): "Because they have not been studied as extensively as conventional medicines, there is little scientific evidence to show that complementary therapies are effective..." The "Because" there seems to imply that if only they were studied more extensively then the evidence that they were effective would appear. Erm, maybe not. 

And then we have this: "Although some research has shown homeopathy to be helpful in asthma, more research is needed to study larger groups of people." There's no citation for the "research" so it's hard to know what this claim is based on. Actually, the available research seems to show that homeopathy has no effect at all, which is exactly what one would expect. So, no, more research is not needed. But saying that it is needed implies that there might be something there to discover, else why bother doing it? 

Come on people, we're well into the 21st century. More research is not needed into whether witches can cast spells or whether melancholia is caused by an excess of black bile. More research is not needed into homeopathy, iridology,  naturopathy or a whole bunch of other nonsense. 

And if you're doing proper research and you get a negative result, you don't have to say that more research is needed just to be polite. 

Comments

  1. Joseph Masters24 May 2013 at 03:43

    I completely agree. An almost entirely useless phrase, unless followed by some explanation of exactly what sort of additional (different) research would be beneficial e.g. "More research is needed into *insert specific area here*, so that we may better understand the underlying cause for this association"

    Felt the necessity to point out this great blog post from another academic at Barts and The London:
    http://blogs.plos.org/speakingofmedicine/2012/06/25/less-research-is-needed/

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nailing Hunt's lies

Here is the soundbite which Hunt has been repeating ad nauseam: "And at the moment we have an NHS where if you have a stroke at the weekends, you're 20% more likely to die. That can't be acceptable." Sounds quite impressive? I tweeted him to ask for evidence and got no reply so I decided to look for my own. It wasn't hard to find. I'll deal with the best and most recent example. The headline finding from this paper is that patients admitted at weekends with a stroke diagnosis have an increased 7-day mortality of 19%, apparently just as Hunt claims: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4487251/ The 7-day mortality for week-end admissions is 12.9% and for week-day admissions is 11.1% and if you factor in comorbidities etc. this gives you an adjusted mortality odds ratio of 1.19. Just as Hunt says. But let's look more closely. At some numbers buried in the text of the paper and not even given a p value, even though they are probably the most st...
Read more

Sex and gender

This post is just here because I find myself having to make the same arguments again and again on twitter so in future I'm just going to link to this. Do I know what I'm talking about? I was a psychiatrist in the National Health Service for thirty years. That means I qualified as a medical doctor and then had post-graduate training, which naturally included some material on human development and sex and gender. I also have two doctoral degrees in human genetics, an MD and a PhD, and have been an author on hundreds of peer-reviewed papers, mostly on human genetics. Because of my research in genetics I am an Honorary Professor at two different London universities. My bio is here: http://www.davecurtis.net/dcurtis.html and the publications can be viewed here: https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?hl=en&user=Vrr4Ig0AAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate Do I do research in sexual development in humans? No. Do I understand it? Yes. I've read the stuff that ...
Read more

SITUATIONAL JUDGEMENT TEST - example ranking question

Example Ranking Question You are in charge of a large national organisation responsible for assessing the abilities of all the country's newly qualified doctors and matching them to appropriate employment. Shortly before distributing the results and final allocations you become aware that there is a problem with the marking system which you have outsourced. Rank in order the following actions in response to this situation (1= Most appropriate; 5= Least appropriate) A. Cross your fingers and hope it will all be OK. Probably nobody will mind too much. B.  Send out the incorrect marks and allocations then follow with an email saying you will get medical schools to check all the papers and have another go at it. C.  As above but attempt to shift some of the blame onto one of the candidates by implying that their smudgy pencil confused the marking machine so really it's all their fault. D.  Admit that things may not have been perfect but undertake to try to do better ...
Read more

How to be a dualist

How to be a dualist David Curtis UCL Genetics Institute, University College London Centre for Psychiatry, Queen Mary University of London d.curtis@ucl.ac.uk   Is dualism really that bad? One of my reasons for writing this is that people seem to think it’s not OK to be a dualist. There’s this notion that dualism is somehow a thoroughly disreputable position. People go “Ah but that’s dualist” or say “Cartesian dualism” as a euphemism for “nonsense”. What I’m going to claim here is that dualism is in fact intellectually quite respectable and defensible, as long as you do it right. Maybe you still won’t tell other people that you’re a dualist but at least you might feel a bit better about yourself. Where to draw the line Saying “mind-body dualism” is risky because the word “mind” is often used to refer to mental activities such as thinking, judging and remembering. It’s perfectly obvious that these are activities of the brain and if we start trying to split them off f...
Read more

Why GWAS's are evil

OK, yes, I know that genome-wide association studies have identified some important genetic effects but there are some important downsides too. I truthfully do not know whether the benefits have outweighed the costs. Why am I saying this? (None of this is supposed to be original. Conversely, I am not going to go to the trouble to find the myriad of people who may have said the same thing first. So sue me. I think that's what blogs are for?) Here are some pertinent points: Nobody believes anything if it's not in a GWAS Studies which would previously have been judged to give perfectly respectable evidence to implicate a candidate gene are nowadays completely ignored because the stupid GWAS missed said gene. People don't believe a candidate gene study which yields a corrected p value of 0.001 derived from 20 markers but they do believe a GWAS which produces one p value of 10^-8. There is no logic in this position. But a lot of people take this attitude. At a recent confe...
Read more