Spin has been defined in the scientific literature as “reporting practices that distort the interpretation of results and mislead readers so that results are viewed in a more favorable light” or as “science hype” (1-3).  Certain practices have been employed to spin results, these include: inappropriate claims, inappropriate extrapolations or recommendations for clinical practice, selective reporting, and more robust or favorable data presentations (1-3).  One place where spin could be occurring is at global medical conferences during oral presentations of clinical trials, late-breaking trials and other trials.  These high-impact clinical conferences bring researchers, clinicians, representatives of the media and pharmaceutical companies together yearly to share, disseminate, and discuss latest research findings.  However, researchers could be “spinning” their findings by switching their outcomes for their conference presentations in order to make their presentations more interesting and pleasing to the audience.  If abstracts do not present an accurate and unbiased reflection of trial results, patients might suffer serious consequences as a result (4).  This presentation will include results of a cross-sectional study that focused on the transparency and integrity of oral presentations of clinical trials (late-breakers and other trials) presented at the high-impact clinical conferences that occurred in 2016.  This study measured the consistency of outcome reporting of late-breaker and other clinical studies from conference presentation to formal publication, as well as trial registration, summary results reporting at a registry, and publication rates.

About Anisa

Anisa does research on research or meta-research to strengthen the regulation of clinical research, and to promote open research, to make science more reliable, trustworthy, verifiable, transparency, and robust.  She is currently a Postdoctoral Associate at the Collaboration for Research Integrity and Transparency (CRIT) at the Yale Law School, School of Medicine and School of Public Health, and at the Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation (CORE) at the Yale School of Medicine.  Towards the end of June 2019, she will be moving on to her next postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Maryland in Baltimore with the research group Restoring Invisible and Abandoned Trials Support Center (RIAT).  Prior to starting her fellowship at Yale, she was pursuing her doctoral studies at the Australian Centre for Health Services Innovation (AusHSI) at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane, Australia.  The title of her thesis was: Towards a culture of open science and data sharing in health and medical research.

The HSRAANZ Conference runs every two years to provide an opportunity to discuss and debate research findings and methods in health services research nationally and internationally.

Through this Conference and its other activities, the Association is working to increase recognition of the importance of health services research to improving the performance of health systems in both countries, and to support researchers in their health services careers.   With changes in health structures being debated in Australia, New Zealand and Internationally, shared challenges ahead in order to improve performance, and health research funders on both sides of the Tasman increasing their focus on health services research in recent years, the Association and the Conference play an important role in promoting and sharing high quality research.