Table 1 is a nice Bingo sheet for suspect RCTs.

By Dorothy Bishop and Paul A Thompson

a basic text that would explain the rationale and potential pitfalls of intervention research, as well as providing a template for good practice in the evaluation and design of intervention studies.

Research, I realized, is what happens as a byproduct when you try to understand something and hit the bounds of what humanity currently knows.2 At that point, there's suddenly no one who can tell you the answer.

There is a hidden cost to having a hypothesis. It arises from the relationship between night science and day science, the two very distinct modes of activity in which scientific ideas are generated and tested, respectively [1, 2]. With a hypothesis in hand, the impressive strengths of day science are unleashed, guiding us in designing tests, estimating parameters, and throwing out the hypothesis if it fails the tests. But when we analyze the results of an experiment, our mental focus on a specific hypothesis can prevent us from exploring other aspects of the data, effectively blinding us to new ideas. A hypothesis then becomes a liability for any night science explorations. The corresponding limitations on our creativity, self-imposed in hypothesis-driven research, are of particular concern in the context …

This qualitative study examined the process of Internalized Sexual Stigma (ISS) in a sample of Egyptian gay men. Participants' experience of ISS was explained using the theoretical understanding that it represents an internal form of minority stress, which is the excess and harmful stress often experienced by individuals from stigmatized social categories due to their minority position. Thematic analysis of interviews with eight Egyptian gay males suggested that these men experienced internal minority stress as a result of the sexually-prejudiced messages they received from different sectors of their society, including its non-affirming religious institutions. Moreover, thematic analysis added cultural understanding to this theoretical explanation by producing an emerging theme that highlighted the possible role of societal pressure to meet gender expectations in perpetuating this problem. Recommendations for mental …

TaskExchange connects people working in health evidence with people who have the time and skills to help.

We discuss ten errors in randomized experiments from real-world examples from the literature and outline best practices for their avoidance. These ten errors include: representing nonrandom allocation as random, failing to adequately conceal allocation, not accounting for changing allocation ratios, replacing subjects in nonrandom ways, failing to account for non-independence, drawing inferences by comparing statistical significance from within-group comparisons instead of between-groups, pooling data and breaking the randomized design, failing to account for missing data, failing to report sufficient information to understand study methods, and failing to frame the causal question as testing the randomized assignment per se.

Arabic bibliographic database.

The study found that patients with Covid-19 treated in hospital who “received ivermectin early reported substantial recovery” and that there was “a substantial improvement and reduction in mortality rate in ivermectin treated groups” by 90%.

But the drug’s promise as a treatment for the virus is in serious doubt after the Elgazzar study was pulled from the Research Square website on Thursday “due to ethical concerns”. Research Square did not outline what those concerns were.

A medical student in London, Jack Lawrence, was among the first to identify serious concerns about the paper, leading to the retraction. He first became aware of the Elgazzar preprint when it was assigned to him by one of his lecturers for an assignment that formed part of his master’s degree …

Here we present a tool — the REAPPRAISED checklist — that aims to help readers, journal editors and anyone else assess whether a paper has flaws that call its integrity into question.

Plain language definitions of health research terms.

Connected papers is a unique, visual tool to help researchers and applied scientists find and explore papers relevant to their field of work. In the graph, papers are arranged according to their similarity. That means that even papers that do not directly cite each other can be strongly connected and very closely positioned. Connected Papers is not a citation tree.

• Powerpoint (?)
• Reference Management Software
• Concept Map
• Annotated Bibliography
• Cornell Method

Ten simple rules to help you communicate the main idea of your paper. These rules are designed to make your paper more influential and the process of writing more efficient and pleasurable.

Presentations by Cochrane SMG.

r/DataHoarder's initiative to rescue Sci-Hub data.

Torrent collection of Sci-Hub data. 77 Terabytes in total, each torrent file ranges from 80 to 100 GB. Needs seeders to avoid data loss amid attack on Sci-Hub. r/datahoarder

Developed by world-leading experts, this course provides over 10 hours of self-directed learning on conducting a complete systematic review process for both new and experienced review authors. Available free for LAMI countries.

The GRADE approach is a system for rating the quality of a body of evidence in systematic reviews and other evidence syntheses, such as health technology assessments, and guidelines and grading recommendations in health care. GRADE offers a transparent and structured process for developing and presenting evidence summaries and for carrying out the steps involved in developing recommendations. It can be used to develop clinical practice guidelines (CPG) and other health care recommendations (e.g. in public health, health policy and systems and coverage decisions). <<<

Narrative review of involuntary treatment around the world.

The most recognised barrier to seeking medical support was perceived stigma. Participants were concerned that such labelling will carry long-term professional implications. Due to the aforementioned, concerns were expressed regarding the confidentiality of support services, such as occupational health. <<<

We use the synthetic control method to analyze the effect of face masks on the spread of Covid-19 in Germany. Our identification approach exploits regional variation in the point in time when face masks became compulsory. Depending on the region we analyse, we find that face masks reduced the cumulative number of registered Covid-19 cases between 2.3% and 13% over a period of 10 days after they became compulsory. Assessing the credibility of the various estimates, we conclude that face masks reduce the daily growth rate of reported infections by around 40%. <<<