Changes in evidence for studies assessing interventions for COVID-19 reported in preprints: meta-research study
- PDF / 1,379,575 Bytes
- 10 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 50 Downloads / 182 Views
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Open Access
Changes in evidence for studies assessing interventions for COVID-19 reported in preprints: meta-research study Theodora Oikonomidi1,2,3* , Isabelle Boutron1,2,3, Olivier Pierre1,2,3, Guillaume Cabanac4 , Philippe Ravaud1,2,3,5 and the COVID-19 NMA Consortium
Abstract Background: The increasing use of preprints to disseminate evidence on the effect of interventions for the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) can lead to multiple evidence sources for a single study, which may differ in the reported evidence. We aim to describe the proportion of evidence on the effect of interventions for COVID-19 from preprints and journal articles and map changes in evidence between and within different sources reporting on the same study. Methods: Meta-research study. We screened the Cochrane living systematic review and network meta-analysis (COVID-NMA) database to identify all preprints and journal articles on all studies assessing interventions for COVID19 published up to 15 August 2020. We compared all evidence sources (i.e., preprint and associated journal article) and the first and latest versions of preprints for each study to identify changes in two evidence components: study results (e.g., numeric change in hazard ratio, odds ratio, event rate, or change in p value > or < 0.05 in any outcome) and abstract conclusions (classified as positive, negative or neutral regarding the intervention effect, and as reporting uncertainty in the findings or not). Changes in study results were further classified as important changes if they (1) represented a change in any effect estimate by ≥ 10% and/or (2) led to a change in the p value crossing the threshold of 0.05. Results: We identified 556 studies. In total, 338 (61%) had been reported in a preprint: 66 (20%) of these had an associated journal article (median time to publication 76 days [interquartile range (IQR) 55–106]) and 91 (27%) had > 1 preprint version. A total of 139 studies (25% of the overall sample) were reported in multiple evidence sources or versions of the same source: for 63 (45%), there was a change in at least one evidence component between or within sources (42 [30%] had a change in study results, and in 29 [21%] the change was classified as important; 33 [24%] had a change in the abstract conclusion). For studies with both a preprint and an article, a median of 29% (IQR 14–50) of total citations were attributed to the preprint instead of the article. (Continued on next page)
* Correspondence: [email protected] 1 Université de Paris, UMR 1153 CRESS Inserm, 75004 Paris, France 2 Clinical Epidemiology Unit, Hôtel-Dieu Hospital, Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris, (AP-HP), 75004 Paris, France Full list of author information is available at the end of the article © The Author(s). 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to t
Data Loading...
