%0 Journal Article
%T Discussing study limitations in reports of biomedical studies- the need for more transparency
%A Milo A Puhan
%A Elie A Akl
%A Dianne Bryant
%A Feng Xie
%A Giovanni Apolone
%A Gerben Riet
%J Health and Quality of Life Outcomes
%D 2012
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1477-7525-10-23
%X The physicist Richard Feynman argued, during his commencement address at the California Institute of Technology in 1974, that utter honesty must be a cornerstone of scientific integrity. He cautioned researchers from fooling themselves by saying: "We've learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind of work."[1]We think that, in today's culture of publishing biomedical studies, many authors may not want to discuss limitations of their studies because they perceive a transparency threshold beyond which the probability of manuscript acceptance goes down (perhaps even to zero) [2]. The goals of this commentary are to briefly review how limitations are currently acknowledged in the biomedical literature, to discuss implications of limitations in biomedical studies, and to make suggestions as to how to openly discuss limitations for scientists who submitting their papers to biomedical journals. This commentary was initiated by two of the authors (MP and GtR), who are doing research in the area of hedging (use of language to express uncertainty), and proposed to the editors of Health and Quality of Life Outcomes. All editors supported the idea of writing a commentary on the importance of discussing limitations transparently and four editors (EAA, DB, FX, GA) joined the writing group. This commentary was developed through discussion and logical arguments by the authors who have extensive experience as authors and editors of biomedical papers themselves.Recognition, acknowledgment and discussion of all potentially important limitations by authors, if presented in an unbiased way, represent a crucial part of the scientific discourse and progress
%U http://www.hqlo.com/content/10/1/23