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The intriguing evolution of effect sizes in biomedical research over time: smaller but more often statistically significant.

ABSTRACT: Background:In medicine, effect sizes (ESs) allow the effects of independent variables (including risk/protective factors or treatment interventions) on dependent variables (e.g., health outcomes) to be quantified. Given that many public health decisions and health care policies are based on ES estimates, it is important to assess how ESs are used in the biomedical literature and to investigate potential trends in their reporting over time. Results:Through a big data approach, the text mining process automatically extracted 814 120 ESs from 13 322 754 PubMed abstracts. Eligible ESs were risk ratio, odds ratio, and hazard ratio, along with their confidence intervals. Here we show a remarkable decrease of ES values in PubMed abstracts between 1990 and 2015 while, concomitantly, results become more often statistically significant. Medians of ES values have decreased over time for both "risk" and "protective" values. This trend was found in nearly all fields of biomedical research, with the most marked downward tendency in genetics. Over the same period, the proportion of statistically significant ESs increased regularly: among the abstracts with at least 1 ES, 74% were statistically significant in 1990-1995, vs 85% in 2010-2015. Conclusions:whereas decreasing ESs could be an intrinsic evolution in biomedical research, the concomitant increase of statistically significant results is more intriguing. Although it is likely that growing sample sizes in biomedical research could explain these results, another explanation may lie in the "publish or perish" context of scientific research, with the probability of a growing orientation toward sensationalism in research reports. Important provisions must be made to improve the credibility of biomedical research and limit waste of resources.

SUBMITTER: Monsarrat P

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5765564 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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The intriguing evolution of effect sizes in biomedical research over time: smaller but more often statistically significant.

Monsarrat Paul P Vergnes Jean-Noel JN

GigaScience 20180101 1

<h4>Background</h4>In medicine, effect sizes (ESs) allow the effects of independent variables (including risk/protective factors or treatment interventions) on dependent variables (e.g., health outcomes) to be quantified. Given that many public health decisions and health care policies are based on ES estimates, it is important to assess how ESs are used in the biomedical literature and to investigate potential trends in their reporting over time.<h4>Results</h4>Through a big data approach, the ...[more]

PMID: 29228281

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Project description:MotivationMost modern intensive care units record the physiological and vital signs of patients. These data can be used to extract signatures, commonly known as biomarkers, that help physicians understand the biological complexity of many syndromes. However, most biological biomarkers suffer from either poor predictive performance or weak explanatory power. Recent developments in time series classification focus on discovering shapelets, i.e. subsequences that are most predictive in terms of class membership. Shapelets have the advantage of combining a high predictive performance with an interpretable component-their shape. Currently, most shapelet discovery methods do not rely on statistical tests to verify the significance of individual shapelets. Therefore, identifying associations between the shapelets of physiological biomarkers and patients that exhibit certain phenotypes of interest enables the discovery and subsequent ranking of physiological signatures that are interpretable, statistically validated and accurate predictors of clinical endpoints.ResultsWe present a novel and scalable method for scanning time series and identifying discriminative patterns that are statistically significant. The significance of a shapelet is evaluated while considering the problem of multiple hypothesis testing and mitigating it by efficiently pruning untestable shapelet candidates with Tarone's method. We demonstrate the utility of our method by discovering patterns in three of a patient's vital signs: heart rate, respiratory rate and systolic blood pressure that are indicators of the severity of a future sepsis event, i.e. an inflammatory response to an infective agent that can lead to organ failure and death, if not treated in time.Availability and implementationWe make our method and the scripts that are required to reproduce the experiments publicly available at https://github.com/BorgwardtLab/S3M.Supplementary informationSupplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Dataset Information

The intriguing evolution of effect sizes in biomedical research over time: smaller but more often statistically significant.

Publications

The intriguing evolution of effect sizes in biomedical research over time: smaller but more often statistically significant.

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