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Rick Gibson's avatar

There should be a requirement that the results be published.

There will be studies that have a null result (the intervention tested had no effect), but even that is useful information, in that it can save everyone else from repeating the same mistake. Might be hard to get those sorts of studies into a peer-reviewed publication, but, even so, writing it up and putting it on the CIHR website would be useful, if only for the academic discipline of having to write up what you did, why you did it, how you looked for an effect, whether or not it worked, and what that means.

As it stands, people are doing research and then passively or actively burying the results, when either “nothing happened” (as above) or “what actually happened wasn’t what we wanted to happen”. In the latter case, the failure to publish/share just reinforces the echo chamber. For example, some researchers “want” trans interventions to “work”, and they won’t publish anything that shows their beliefs aren’t supported by actual results. Hence, you’ll read that there’s nothing published to say trans interventions are harmful or useless. That lack of published evidence is then used as evidence to support continuing to do that which could well be harmful or useless.

Failure to publish this stuff is problematic, either way.

Simple fix. Don’t hand out money for research without requiring a “report” at the end.

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Erwin Dreessen's avatar

This is very troubling. How does André Pelletier's assertion that "There are absolutely reports generated from all of this work" square with David's finding? I'd be happy to see this further looked into (as a minimum, see a response from CIHR).

That you picked a transgender study for an example is a bit unfortunate because it is a subject that provokes its own biases.

For the larger picture, there should be aggregate data on the 39,000 studies: Status, report, etc.

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