Effectiveness research: stable principles, dynamic methods

According to the authors COOP’ e-cohorts will accelerate the research process by avoiding redundancy and limiting research waste. According to Walter et al. this has been defined as the number of changes in outcomes that are required to change statistical significance, which provides a potentially misleading perspective because statistical significance conveys no information about treatment effect size. The authors found that the small data changes required to affect statistical significance may actually be unlikely to occur, and describe the interpretation of studies with various combinations of statistical significance, clinical importance of the results and their quantitative stability. According to the authors, this finding suggests ‘p-hacking’ [6] and selective reporting of post hoc subgroup results in the early studies.