Department of Epidemiology, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD 21205
Department of Epidemiology, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD 21205.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2018 Mar 13;115(11):2590-2594. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1708273114.
We find standards useful in everyday life and in science, although we do not always follow them. Adopting new standards can be expensive, so there may be a strong incentive to maintain the rather than adopt new standards. The scientific community has many standards encompassing both doing clinical research and reporting it, including standards for design and measurement. Although existing research standards have improved both research and its reporting, we need to unify existing standards and to fill the gaps between steps throughout the research process. Existing gaps include implementation of standards and links between standards for study registration (to know about all studies undertaken), study protocols (to identify the preplanned study design and methods), data collection (to assess outcomes that are important and comparable across studies), dissemination of findings (to know the results of previous studies), data sharing (to make best use of existing data), and evidence synthesis (to draw appropriate conclusions from the body of evidence). The scientific community must work together to harmonize existing standards, to ensure that standards are kept up to date, to check that standards are followed, and to develop standards where they are still needed. A unified system of standards will make our work more reproducible.
我们在日常生活和科学中都发现标准很有用，尽管我们并不总是遵循它们。采用新标准可能代价高昂，因此，维持旧标准而不采用新标准可能会有强烈的动机。科学界有许多涵盖临床研究和报告的标准，包括设计和测量标准。尽管现有的研究标准已经提高了研究及其报告的质量，但我们需要统一现有的标准，并填补研究过程中各个步骤之间的差距。现有的差距包括标准的实施以及研究注册（了解所有进行的研究）、研究方案（确定预先计划的研究设计和方法）、数据收集（评估重要且可在研究间比较的结果）、研究结果的传播（了解先前研究的结果）、数据共享（充分利用现有数据）和证据综合（从证据体中得出适当的结论）之间的标准链接。科学界必须共同努力，协调现有的标准，确保标准得到更新，检查标准是否得到遵守，并在仍需要标准的地方制定标准。一个统一的标准体系将使我们的工作更具可重复性。
