Department of Psychopharmacology, National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bangalore, Karnataka, India.
Indian J Psychiatry. 2011 Oct;53(4):362-6. doi: 10.4103/0019-5545.91912.
Despite peer review, publications in scientific journals are not always well written, sometimes contain errors, and often exhibit deliberate or unintended biases. It is necessary to learn how to identify such limitations. It is also necessary to learn how to read between and beyond the lines of papers no matter how well written they are and no matter how highly ranked the journal is.
This paper critically examines an important article in a leading journal with a view to help the reader learn how to place the findings of a study in perspective, understand its limitations, and glean information beyond that actually presented and discussed in the text.
Several issues are examined; these relate to case-control research designs, confounding, propensity matching, absolute risk, confidence intervals, interpretation of findings, real-world relevance, ecological validity, and definition of a cause-effect relationship.
The issues examined in this paper reflect common themes in research, and a reader aware of these themes will more easily identify them in his future readings.
尽管经过同行评审，科学期刊上的出版物并不总是写得很好，有时包含错误，并且经常表现出故意或无意的偏见。有必要学习如何识别这些限制。无论论文写得多么好，无论期刊排名多高，都有必要学会在论文的字里行间阅读，理解其局限性，并获取实际呈现和讨论之外的信息。
本文批判性地审查了一份领先期刊上的重要文章，以期帮助读者学会如何从不同角度看待研究结果，理解其局限性，并从文本中实际呈现和讨论之外获取信息。
本文检查了几个问题；这些问题涉及病例对照研究设计、混杂、倾向匹配、绝对风险、置信区间、发现的解释、与现实世界的相关性、生态有效性以及因果关系的定义。
本文检查的问题反映了研究中的常见主题，对这些主题有了解的读者将更容易在未来的阅读中识别它们。
