This post follows up on my previous post on the same topic of cannabis use and psychosis. I was inspired by a podcast presented by Matt, Chris, and Don from the Population Health Exchange of the Boston University School Health Public Health. My focus here is on the “spinning in…

This post looks at how misreporting (spin) occurs in psychiatry and psychology research, more specifically in its abstracts. In 2019, Samuel Jellison and his team looked into this. We will see what they found. They reviewed research papers published between January 2012 and December 2017. Of the located 116 papers,…

Most often, we read only abstracts of research papers. We trust the researchers report their findings accurately. It does don’t happen always as we expect, particularly when the research ends up with non-significant primary outcomes. Instead, we find only significant secondary outcomes. This is also a type of spin and…

In my previous post, I dealt with how spin occurs in reporting observational studies: The use of causal language in reporting findings of observational studies. This post adds another spin method that occurs frequently in reporting results of observational studies: making recommendations based on results from observational study designs. Observational…

Image by StartupStockPhotos from Pixabay The distortion of research findings happens; it is a big problem; it is scientific mischief, Robert H Fletcher 1 and Bert Black reported in the Medical Law journal in 2007. Sometimes, researchers do that consciously but not always; it can also happen unconsciously. Spin in scientific reporting…