Seeing the Forest and the Trees

For the global chiropractic research enterprise to achieve the most good, we need to understand and foster research from the level of the individual paper up to the behaviour of the entire research community.

That begins with getting a good sense of the breadth and depth of the research which provides the scientific underpinnings of the discipline. Research data-bases such as PubMed and Web of Science do a wonderful job of indexing the biomedical literature, but historically, they have not provided good coverage of research related to chiropractic. The situation is improving, but there is still not one authoritative source that gives comprehensive coverage and analysis. That was one important motivation for this collaboration.

However, we are not just about indexing papers. This collaboration also advocates for the appropriate use of validated metrics to appreciate the quality of research. We encourage all of our members and stakeholders to think critically about how we place value on research, researchers and research institutions.

Finally, we seek to understand the dynamics of the entire global chiropractic research enterprise. We understand that by analyzing the dynamics of the entire research community we can identify those behaviours which result in the best outcomes, meaning efficient production of high-quality research which solves important societal health problems. Read more…

Infodemiology and Alt-metrics

Infodemiology refers to the use of social media metrics to infer health information. In this example, we looked at 15-year averages of normalized weekly Google searches for hayfever and back pain. ‘Normalized’ means that the number of hits in the busiest week of the 15-year period was set at 100, and all other weeks scaled against this. Not surprisingly, we see a peak in searches for information on hayfever beginning in the spring and peaking in mid-summer. On the other hand, there is virtually no seasonal variation in searches for information on back pain.

Research Integrity – a Wholist View

These days, discussions about research integrity don’t necessarily concern such things as honesty and transparency, although these are important. In research, the term integrity is often used in the same way that it might be employed in engineering or architecture. It refers to resilience in structures and procedures in order to ensure the quality of the final product. This is important because when people try to evaluate research, they are often doing so after the fact using metrics to gauge outcome. With this back-end approach, missteps may only be discovered years after a project is completed. Today, better Research Performing Organizations (RPOs) are tackling research quality from the front end, putting in place policies, practices and infrastructure that mitigate risks before they can even appear.

For many RPOs this means developing a Research Integrity Promotion Plan that prioritizes people and supports, such as mentoring and training. A good Research Integrity Promotion Plan also emphasizes the role of the organization and does not allow all responsibility for research integrity to be downloaded to the individual researcher. Virtually all chiropractic RPOs have some kind of research ethics infrastructure. However, the industry standards are now moving towards more wholistic supports including data-management protocols to prevent data loss (by accident or due to malicious actors), front-end agreements on authorship, and mentorship contracts. Read more…

Social network map representing interests of members of two chiropractic Facebook groups: one dedicated to evidence-based care (orange) and the other to pediatrics (lavender). The groups don’t simply fail to overlap in social media space; they actually seem to repel one another. This suggests that the members of these two groups differ not just on matters concerning evidence-based care and pediatrics, but on many other issues.