European universities dismal at reporting results of clinical trials | Hacker News Reader

European universities dismal at reporting results of clinical trials

nature.com

128 pointslainon26 comments

US universities are also pretty bad: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/09/20/re..., although Europe seems to be doing a worse job at complying with mandatory reporting in general.

Funnily enough, everyone with 100% compliance is a Big Pharma company, while everyone with 0% compliance is an academic university.

Academia is about ego, not being correct.

If you are getting a PhD, you prove what your professor tells you.

It seems every time I read a published study, the data is unusable, but they claim an extremely specific outcome.

My curiosity, why does the peer review process let this go?

Collaborator to me, recently:

"It doesn't matter what's in the paper, I am on the editorial board and it will get published. It's more important that we aren't scooped than that the result is accurate."

I'm sure they are somewhat different in pharma than where I live, but academic incentives are very wonky and often not conducive to "Quality Research".

If you are getting a PhD, chances are you or your professor applied for and received funding for a specific research project - and that's what you research. Obviously an advisor will guide you towards doing work they can advise on, as is their role...

At the end of the project, results are expected and reported. Broad significant outcomes are unlikely without lots of clean data, so the trend is towards narrow-but-significant outcomes.

Reporting is biased against publishing insignificant outcomes... that's a valid criticism. Peer-reviewed publication is a lot of work to announce "we found nothing". However, that is not a valid critique of peer review - even null results are thoroughly vetted.

Despite flaws, peer reviewed science is still clearly superior to commercial research - which suppressed climate change, smoking cancer, and the effects of lead air pollution for decades.

The Big Pharma universities are probably pushed to do it by the companies.

I think you misread your parent comment. There aren't Big Pharma Universities. Big Pharma companies have good compliance, universities have bad compliance.

You're right. I misread it as universities backed by big pharma.

It's starting to seem like we agressively discuss a lot of proposed European rules here on HN. But, when they come into effect they're immediately ignored by the people who should be complying and the people who should be enforcing.

In this instance it might be because there are is no penalty for running afoul of the obligations:

> Updated laws on clinical trials that are not expected to become legally binding until 2020 specify that there should be penalties for institutions that don’t comply with the rules.

If following the rules was a mandatory requirement for further funding for the same institution, I am sure they would update their internal policies in an eyeblink.

Same with gdpr, it was on the rolls since 2016(?)

I've been (naively?) surprised at how many websites clearly break the GDPR rules we've been wringing our hand over on HN for the past months.

GDPR is imposed regularly, see [1] for an early account. Or do you mean something else?

[1] https://www.gdprtoday.org/gdpr-in-numbers/

An interesting read on the effects of FDA trial registration requirements and publication bias: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6199729/

How many of these studies are conducted in English vs. the legacy local language?

Languages other than English are considered legacy now?

For Academia, yes. All of the scientific articles are written in that language.

The youngest generations are hugely influenced by Youtube and the internet, and many speak English more fluently than their own legacy local language.

This is a great thing for humanity. A common language will ease the flow of ideas and simplify commerce.

Keep in mind that what you are preemptively celebrating will cause enormous cultural strife worldwide. People and societies are usually not welcoming of extreme cultural assimilation of this kind.

On the internet sometimes people joke about how strongly France is culturally fighting the English language, but if the Anglicisation trend continues many countries could end up facing dangerous backlashes.

What do you mean 'will cause' - it has already happened.

Almost all children learn English in Government primary school in Europe, and quite a lot study at private schools with the entire curriculum in that language. The legacy local language is basically treated as a secondary language, something to use for gossip and low-level transactions with local businesses (bars, supermarkets, plumbers).

Many Governments offer services in both languages: paying taxes, driver licensing, etc.

What is the point of becoming highly fluent in a legacy local language, even for someone born in that country - to write books and articles that no one (in a global context) will ever read? Fluency in English delivers so much more, has many more learning resources available, and is a much better investment of school time.

In which countries do you see that?

And destroy a great deal of culture. No thanks.

Who cares about the culture? The in efficiency due to the lack of a common language is large, standardizing on a language would be an amazing boost to productivity and pushing humanity forward.

Culture is not language, it is the people. Why do people defend language, which can be recorded, yet are silent on the significantly below-replacement fertility rates of some European populations, and the high levels of immigration that will eventually replace the native 'cultures'?

> Culture is not language, it is the people.

No, culture is not people, it is the shared behaviors and values of the people; use of a particular language is part of that. Immigration may threaten that (since the immigrants do bring their own culture), but immigrants often assimilate into the host culture, or at least adopt large portions of it.

Culture is not genetic heritage.

All languages other than Chinese are legacy :)

There's more English than Chinese speakers according to Ethnologue 2019.

Just wait a century or two

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