Posts in this category will be concerned with the process of research rather than the results of research
Clinical Rehabilitation, the journal I have edited from 1994 to 2021, rejects about 88% of all submissions. Rejections fall into two groups. Many papers are not worth publishing or are entirely outside the scope of a rehabilitation journal. For the remainder, it is a question of relative priority. Some articles are better than others, and …
Today, 18th July 2021, the UK National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), one of the major health research funding bodies in the UK announced £19.6M had been allocated to research into the late effects of Covid-19 infection (here), commonly known as Long Covid. This is in addition to £18.5 million allocated in February (here), funding …
On Friday, 2nd July 2021 (at 05.00 hrs), I participated in a debate organised by Professor Barbara Wilson and hosted virtually in Melbourne, Australia. The discussion concerned the use of goal attainment scaling (GAS). Two speakers supported its use clinically, in audit, and in research; two opposed it. At the outset, only 4% of listeners …
The published paper featured in this post illustrates many features of a good rehabilitation research paper. (A shame it was not published in a rehabilitation journal!) The blog is categorised as Education and Training, because the paper is useful as an example, and could generate discussion. The paper, available here, concerns the pain and hand …
Can you predict who will benefit from rehabilitation? When I was the editor of Clinical Rehabilitation, I saw a steady stream of studies that attempted to predict who would benefit from a rehabilitation intervention. One term commonly used was responder analysis, which assumes that a person who responds (to rehabilitation) can be identified and then …
A recently published paper discusses placebos used in randomised controlled trials, referring to the placebo medication as “the Unknown Variable in a Controlled Trial”. The short but important paper is worth reading. It made me reflect on the nature of the control in rehabilitation trials – sometimes even referred to as a placebo by the …
Designing and completing a large, well-designed randomised study is hard work. It must be very depressing when the result is negative – your programme of rehabilitation did not have any measurable effect. It happens. But we should not despair, and we should learn, and profit from failure. (The studies are here and here.) The first …
Systematic reviews, with or without meta-analysis are attractive. They appear to offer much more secure answers, by taking ‘the totality of published evidence’. They can be undertaken without major financial outlay, although they may need much time from reviewers. They attract readers to a journal. They are now often required as evidence of an unmet …
There are many useful published standards that improve the quality of all published biomedical research. One good source of information about them is the Equator Network. Many of them apply well to rehabilitation, but there has been some disquiet. The Cochrane Rehabilitation group has set up a special working party to review published standards and, …
This post refers to two papers in the JAMA Journal of Internal Medicine: one is the report on a randomised controlled trial comparing equivalent times spent on mindfulness or disease-specific education in people with migraine; the other is a commentary on it, pointing out that although there was no effect on primary outcome (frequency of …
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