A common type of bias that plagues medical research across all journals is publication bias: studies that find positive results are considered more interesting and therefore more likely to be published.
Positive findings about drugs in particular tend have a higher chance of ending up in a journal than those that didn’t – especially among industry-funded studies – but publication bias tends to appear across the board.
That’s what makes the open-access Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine so interesting, and helpful for journalists. The most common word you’ll find in the titles of these studies is “not.”
For example, recent studies include the following:
- MicroRNAs in urine are not biomarkers of multiple myeloma
- Preoperative endoscopic tattooing to mark the tumour site does not improve lymph node retrieval in colorectal cancer: a retrospective cohort study
- No effects of a 12-week supervised exercise therapy program on gait in patients with mild to moderate osteoarthritis: a secondary analysis of a randomized trial
- Skeletal muscle atrophy in sedentary Zucker obese rats is not caused by calpain-mediated muscle damage or lipid peroxidation induced by oxidative stress
Sexy? Maybe not. Important? Definitely, at least if these results aren’t being published elsewhere and represent a solidly done study that contradicts studies published in other journals. Most of the studies published in this journal are not necessarily ones that would form a complete story on its own, but journalists can use the journal in at least two ways to add value to their reporting.
First, when researching a particular topic or a single-study story, a reporter could do a quick search of the journal to see if anything relates to the same topic. Then compare the quality of the two studies, or reach out to the author of the negative results paper for comment on the new study.
Second, simply browsing and doing searches might turn up story ideas. One recent study in the journal found no impact on mice offspring when mothers exercised before and after pregnancy. While journalists should view any mouse study with a high degree of skepticism if the goal seems to be to generalize the results to humans, but a study like this presents a negative result. How many similar studies produced positive results? What’s the difference? Did they use different mice types? What were the rationales for the types of mice used? The answers to these questions might lead to an interesting feature on the way scientists choose mouse models to study weight in pregnancy and the validity — if any — of doing so.
If nothing else, setting up an alert from the journal, or periodically checking the site, might offer something just different enough from the usual fare that it spurs an idea for an underreported story.
