Waste of Research. Is There Any Solution? “Beginning from the Beginning” instead of “Beginning from the End”
Abstract
There have always been challenges concerning tackling knowledge to practice. It is estimated that 85% of the investment in health research are wasted. Due to low quality, not all systematic review and meta-analysis are placed at the top of the hierarchy of evidence. Many individual clinical trials do not have the essential standards; therefore, conducting systematic reviews based on these low-quality individual studies is unreliable as they cannot be applied in healthcare decision-making and lead to resource waste. To overcome this great issue, several organizations have been worked hard to improve data extraction from only well-developed individual studies. However, it is not sufficient.
It is time to stop and look back all years behind. It is time to reconsider our efforts to make the best conclusion in order to prohibit the huge waste of energy, time, and resources. The old viewpoint “the Beginning from the End” must be replaced with the new one “the Beginning from the Beginning”. It means, we must do all struggles to conduct clinical trials in a standard high-quality format from the beginning as much as we could. Although, it does not seem easy, it might be possible by funding a high discipline, well-respected organization that is engaged in this critical issue. The supposed organization must define standards, flexible criteria for clinical trials, and all investigators must perform clinical trials under the supervision of this organization. Providing a considerable financial resource to grant the researches of the low- and middle-income countries to do clinical trials based on the designed protocol, considering an independent, high discipline journal for publishing well-conducted clinical trials regardless of their results, teaching researchers, considering another efficient policy to rank the journals rather than “impact factor” could help achieve this far-reach goal.
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