BMJ UK Research Paper of the Year Award won by Prof Darrel Francis and team

Prof Darrel Francis and his DAMASCENE writing group received the BMJ UK Research Paper of the Year Award on 6th May 2015.

The award was presented for the group’s study on discrepancies in published clinical trials. This prestigious award recognises original UK research that has the potential to contribute significantly to improving health and healthcare.

Bone marrow stem cells have been widely studied as a potential therapeutic for patients who have suffered heart failure or heart attack. Many clinical trials have been undertaken but results are far from conclusive. Some claim significant improvements whereas others report no improvement for patients.

In 2013, researchers from the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College London analysed five ground-breaking clinical trials. Each report on these trials claimed positive results for patients but numerous unexplained discrepancies were discovered. These findings prompted a deeper investigation by the DAMASCENE writing group. Their aim was to establish whether discrepancies in clinical trial methodologies and reporting accounted for the mixed levels of reported effects of this therapy.

Darrel Francis, Professor of Cardiology at Imperial College in London says: “Some things in the early trials didn’t add up and when we went to the journals that published them, we were fobbed off. So we decided to look at discrepancies in all the published trials.”

The team’s paper, published in The BMJ, concluded that the more discrepancies a paper contained, the more positive its results. “This field of therapy appears to be most effective in the hands of researchers whose reports contain factual impossibilities,” say Francis and colleague Graham Cole. “Indeed, when the factual impossibilities disappeared, so did any effect of the therapy.”

They expected a sharp reaction from researchers with many discrepancies. “We tried to soft en the blow by not naming the hundreds of report authors directly.” Francis says. “But it was authors with few discrepancies, and small or zero effect sizes, who criticised the study most vocally.”

Judges’ comments:

This study blows the whistle on therapeutic claims, signalled by errors in reporting. To do this, it pioneers a new approach to assessing the quality of research. In doing so, the authors cast a spotlight on problems in some of the original investigations and the way that the investigators reported their studies. Their findings also slam the editorial and peer reviewer processes of the journals in which these studies were reported. This was a novel approach to detecting underlying issues in scientific reporting.

Image (Flickr: Nick McPhee)