Duration: 20 minutes
Presented by Evan Mayo-Wilson, PhD
Speakers have kindly provided responses to questions submitted by conference participants during the Discussion session that did not get an opportunity to be discussed.
- How can we establish clinical significance for every study?
Clinical significance of changes on specific measures might be related to the problem or population rather than a study per se, and various types of research might contribute to understanding what people with a given health problem consider meaningful change. Although core outcome sets do not always address this level of detail, it is something that core outcome set developers could consider. For example, a core outcome set might propose reporting the proportion of participants with 30% change or 50% change on a given measure for a particular problem/population.
- Question from Kufre Okop – It seems that Proofs-of-Concepts (POC) are not quite appealing to journals to publish. This shouldn’t be the case, as Prof Powell has spoken about the importance of POC in getting to learn about outcomes. As it is, in what ways can good science through POC be made appealing to be accepted by most credible journal publication ‘industry’ and research-supporting institutions?
Publications are an imperfect proxy for researcher quality and productivity, so research institutions should use additional metrics to evaluate researchers. While some journals will never publish early stage research, several journals (e.g., Pilot and Feasibility Studies, Trials, BMJ Open, F1000, PLOS One) do publish early stage research. Early stage research can also be published using pre-print servers and on platforms such as OSF (https://osf.io/).
PLEASE NOTE: Though numerous questions were submitted by conference participants, only the questions for which we obtained responses are shared here.