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Publication bias is a type of bias that occurs in published academic research. It occurs when the outcome of an experiment or research study influences the decision whether to publish or otherwise distribute it. Publication bias matters because literature reviews regarding support for a hypothesis can be biased if the original literature is contaminated by publication bias. Publishing only results that show a significant finding disturbs the balance of findings.
Contents
- Definition
- Evidence
- Effects on meta analysis
- Compensation examples
- Risks
- Remedies
- Study registration
- References
Studies with significant results can be of the same standard as studies with a null result with respect to quality of execution and design. However, statistically significant results are three times more likely to be published than papers with null results.
Multiple factors contribute to publication bias. For instance, once a scientific finding is well established, it may become newsworthy to publish reliable papers that fail to reject the null hypothesis. It has been found that the most common reason for non-publication is simply that investigators decline to submit results, leading to non-response bias. Factors cited as underlying this effect include investigators assuming they must have made a mistake, failure to support a known finding, loss of interest in the topic, or anticipation that others will be uninterested in the null results.
Attempts to identify unpublished studies often prove difficult or are unsatisfactory. In an effort to combat this problem, some journals require that studies submitted for publication are pre-registered (registering a study prior to collection of data and analysis) with organizations like the Center for Open Science.
Other proposed strategies to detect and control for publication bias include p-curve analysis and disfavoring small and non-randomised studies because of their demonstrated high susceptibility to error and bias.
Definition
Publication bias occurs when the publication of research results depends not just on the quality of the research but also on the hypothesis tested, and the significance and direction of effects detected. The term was first used in 1959 by statistician Theodore Sterling to refer to fields in which "successful" research is more likely to be published. As a result, "the literature of such a field consists in substantial part of false conclusions resulting from type-I errors".
Publication bias is sometimes called the "file drawer effect," or "file drawer problem." This term suggests that results not supporting the hypotheses of researchers often go no further than the researchers' file drawers, leading to a bias in published research. The term "file drawer problem" was coined by Rosenthal in 1979.
Positive-results bias, a type of publication bias, occurs when authors are more likely to submit, or editors are more likely to accept, positive results than negative or inconclusive results. Outcome reporting bias occurs when multiple outcomes are measured and analyzed, but the reporting of these outcomes is dependent on the strength and direction of its results. A generic term coined to describe these post-hoc choices is HARKing ("Hypothesizing After the Results are Known").
Evidence
The presence of publication bias in the literature has been most extensively studied in biomedical research. Investigators following clinical trials from the submission of their protocols to ethics committees (or regulatory authorities) until the publication of their results observed that those with positive results are more likely to be published. In addition, studies often fail to report negative results when published, as demonstrated by research comparing study protocols with published articles.
The presence of publication bias was investigated in meta-analyses. The largest such analysis investigated the presence of publication bias in systematic reviews of medical treatments from the Cochrane Library. The study showed that statistically positive significant findings are 27% more likely to be included in meta-analyses of efficacy than other findings. Results showing no evidence of adverse effects have a 78% greater probability of inclusion in safety studies than statistically significant results showing adverse effects. Evidence of publication bias was found in meta-analyses published in prominent medical journals.
Effects on meta-analysis
Where publication bias is present, published studies do not represent the universe of valid studies. This bias distorts the results of meta-analyses and systematic reviews. For example, evidence-based medicine is increasingly reliant on meta-analysis to assess evidence.
Meta-analyses and systematic reviews can account for publication bias by identifying unpublished studies. Publication bias compensation techniques, include selection models and methods based on the funnel plot, such as Begg's test, Egger's test, and the trim and fill method. However, since these methods offer reduced statistical power and are based on strong and unverifiable assumptions, they do not guarantee the validity of conclusions.
Compensation examples
Two meta-analyses of the efficacy of reboxetine as an antidepressant demonstrated attempts to detect publication bias in clinical trials. Based on positive trial data, reboxetine was originally passed as a treatment for depression in many countries in Europe and the UK in 2001 (though in practice it is rarely used for this indication). A 2010 meta-analysis concluded that reboxetine was ineffective and that the preponderance of positive-outcome trials reflected publication bias, mostly due to trials published by the drug manufacturer Pfizer. A subsequent meta-analysis published in 2011, based on the original data, found flaws in the 2010 analyses and suggested that the data indicated reboxetine was effective in severe depression (see Reboxetine ยง Efficacy). Examples of publication bias are given by Goldacre and Wilmshurst.
In the social sciences, a study of published papers exploring the relationship between corporate social and financial performance found that "in economics, finance, and accounting journals, the average correlations were only about half the magnitude of the findings published in Social Issues Management, Business Ethics, or Business and Society journals".
One example cited as an instance of publication bias is the refusal to publish attempted replications of Bem's work that claimed evidence for precognition by The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (the original publisher of Bem's article).
An analysis comparing studies of gene-disease associations originating in China to those originating outside China found that those conducted within the country reported a stronger association and a more statistically significant result.
Risks
Ioannidis argued that "claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias." He lists the following factors as those that make a paper with a positive result more likely to enter the literature and suppress negative-result papers:
Other factors include experimenter bias and white hat bias.
Remedies
Publication bias can be contained through better-powered studies, enhanced research standards, and careful consideration of true and non-true relationships. Better-powered studies refer to large studies that deliver definitive results or test major concepts and lead to low-bias meta-analysis. Enhanced research standards such as the pre-registration of protocols, the registration of data collections and adherence to established protocols are other techniques. To avoid false-positive results, the experimenter must consider the chances that they are testing a true or non-true relationship. This can be untertaken by properly assessing the false positive report probability based on the statistical power of the test and reconfirming (whenever ethically acceptable) established findings of prior studies known to have minimal bias.
Study registration
In September 2004, editors of prominent medical journals (including the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, Annals of Internal Medicine, and JAMA) announced that they would no longer publish results of drug research sponsored by pharmaceutical companies, unless that research was registered in a public clinical trials registry database from the start. Furthermore, some journals (e.g. Trials), encourage publication of study protocols in their journals.
The World Health Organization (WHO) agreed that basic information about all clinical trials should be registered at the study's inception, and that this information should be publicly accessible through the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform. Additionally, public availability of complete study protocols, alongside reports of trials, is becoming more common for studies .