COMPare

Tracking switched outcomes in clinical trials

Outcome switching in clinical trials is a serious problem. Between October 2015 and January 2016, the COMPare team systematically checked every trial published in the top five medical journals, to see if they misreported their findings. Specifically:

1. We compared each clinical trial report with its protocol or registry entry. Some trials reported their outcomes perfectly. For the others, we counted how many of the outcomes pre-specified in the protocol or registry were never reported. We also counted how many new outcomes were silently added.
2. When we detected unreported or added outcomes, we wrote a letter to the journal pointing them out. We tracked which journals published our letters - and which did not.

Click here to see the full results.

Or read the papers:

• COMPare: Qualitative analysis of researchers’ responses to critical correspondence on a cohort of 58 misreported trials
• COMPare: a prospective cohort study correcting and monitoring 58 misreported trials in real time