Influence of the statistical significance of results and spin on readers’ interpretation of the results in an abstract for a hypothetical clinical trial: a randomised trial
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: To assess the impact on readers' interpretation of the results reported in an abstract for a hypothetical clinical trial with (1) a statistically significant result (SSR), (2) spin, (3) both an SSR and spin compared with (4) no spin and no SSR. PARTICIPANTS: Health students and professionals from universities and health institutions in France and the UK. INTERVENTIONS: Participants completed an online questionnaire using Likert scales and free text, after reading one of the four versions of an abstract about a hypothetical randomised trial evaluating 'Naranex' and 'Bulofil' (two hypothetical drugs) for chronic low back pain. The abstracts differed in (1) reported result of 'mean difference of 1.31 points (95% CI 0.08 to 2.54, p= 0.04)' or 'mean difference of 1.31 points (95% CI -0.08 to 2.70, p= 0.06)' and (2) presence or absence of spin. The effect size for the trial's primary outcome (pain disability score) was the same in each abstract, slightly in favour of Naranex. PRIMARY OUTCOME: The reader's interpretation of the trial's results, based on their answer (1, disagree; 4, neutral; 7, agree) to the following statement: 'About the main findings of the study, what is your opinion about the following statement: 'Naranex is better than Bulofil'?' RESULTS: Two hundred and ninety-seven of the 404 people randomised to receive one of the four abstracts completed the study. Respondents were more likely to favour Narenex when the abstract reported an SSR without spin, a statistically significant result with spin, a non-statistically significant result with spin, compared with when it reported a non-SSR without spin. CONCLUSION: Statistical significance appears to have influenced readers' perception whatever the level of spin, while spin influenced readers' perception when the results were not statistically significant but did not appear to have an impact when results were statistically significant.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.703 | 0.898 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.014 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; the direct Gemma label and the distilled Codex classifier agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".