More publications needed from work funded by NZ Health Research Council, Auckland team says
Research funded by the Health Research Council of New Zealand results in publication nearly 9 times out of 10, a study has found, but there is significant “research waste”.
Researchers at the University of Auckland examined 374 grants worth a total of NZ$471.7 million in council money. They found that “13 per cent of the HRC projects and programmes from 2006 to 2014 have not contributed to the healthcare evidence as their results remain unknown”. Those grants represented about 10 per cent of the funding.
The study says that more publications should result and that “null” findings need to be shared more often. It was published on 31 May in the journal BMJ Open.
Non-publication is “a failure of our obligation, as researchers, to the trial volunteers who enter trials with the belief that their contribution will go towards helping others”, the authors, led by obstetrics researcher Marian Showell, wrote. They described the tendency to not publish “null result” or “negative result” findings as “publication bias” that “potentially misrepresents healthcare evidence”.
The practice wastes money and time, they wrote.
More active role
In 2020, the HRC signed up to a World Health Organization agreement to publish results of research within a year of trial completion.
The Auckland team found that the fields of mental health and biomedical engineering were the most likely to not publish, at 60 and 50 per cent respectively. Thirteen out of 26 disciplines funded by the HRC published all their results. The average time to reach publication was 4.7 years.
The researchers looked at grants up to 2014 in order to allow eight years for results of the funded grants to be published. They said that “the HRC could play a more active, targeted role in monitoring the reporting of study results and increasing their capacity to encourage study investigators to disseminate results”.