Biased Outcome reporting Guidelines for Underwhelming Studies (BOGUS) statement and checklist

Abstract

Most biomedical research is flawed. While existing reporting guidelines (eg, STROBE, CONSORT, STARD) highlight the strengths of already strong studies, few resources exist to highlight the "strengths" of weak studies. The Biased Outcome reporting Guidelines for Underwhelming Studies (BOGUS) initiative fills a real gap in the multitude of existing guidelines. Representing a vast effort undertaken by a single individual with multiple opinions over seven days of productive pandemic procrastination, the guidelines are a first for "precision reporting" of underwhelming studies, and underscore ways of reporting underdeveloped methods and underachieving efforts. These guidelines will allow authors to better underemphasise limitations, underestimate bias, and undervalue their readers without underselling their work.

Of research and robots: making sense of chance findings

“…In a field of research prone to problems with transparency, reproducibility, ethics, and effectiveness, reporting should be informed by recent AI extensions to the SPIRIT and CONSORT statements, 16 17 rather than by the Christmas BMJ's noble but misguided BOGUS guide to spinning underwhelming results. 18 We might next consider a BOGUS AI extension, highlighting inadequate reporting of the development and validation of AI models used in healthcare. These models are often associated with eyecatching performance metrics, generated by opaque methods and rarely validated in clinical settings.…”

Dubious data and contamination of the research literature on pain

“…But, misconduct apart, there are various sleights of hand that are common in reporting clinical practice but that also produce untrustworthy data. It is worth reading about Open Science practices to understand this better, or you could follow Bauer’s tongue-in-cheek checklist for highlighting the ‘strengths’ of weak studies, 9 including options such as ‘Report only hypotheses with most interesting findings’, ‘Report rounded-down p values’ and ‘Report only the most obvious limitations of the research’. It is increasingly hard to do research as a clinician: time and other resources are scarce, and the complex documentation for ethical and R&D approval is voluminous and daunting.…”