Transparency of COVID-19-related research: A meta-research study

Ahmad Sofi-Mahmudi; Eero Raittio; Sergio E Uribe

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0288406

Transparency of COVID-19-related research: A meta-research study

PLoS One. 2023 Jul 26;18(7):e0288406. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0288406. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Ahmad Sofi-Mahmudi^{1

2

3}, Eero Raittio^{4

5}, Sergio E Uribe^{6

7

8}

Affiliations

¹ National Pain Centre, Department of Anesthesia, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
² Department of Health Research Methods, Evidence and Impact, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
³ Seqiz Health Network, Kurdistan University of Medical Sciences, Seqiz, Kurdistan.
⁴ Institute of Dentistry, University of Eastern Finland, Kuopio, Finland.
⁵ Department of Dentistry and Oral Health, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark.
⁶ Department of Conservative Dentistry and Oral Health, Riga Stradins University, Riga, Latvia.
⁷ School of Dentistry, Universidad Austral de Chile, Valdivia, Chile.
⁸ Baltic Biomaterials Centre of Excellence, Headquarters at Riga Technical University, Riga, Latvia.

Abstract

Background: We aimed to assess the adherence to five transparency practices (data availability, code availability, protocol registration and conflicts of interest (COI), and funding disclosures) from open access Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) related articles.

Methods: We searched and exported all open access COVID-19-related articles from PubMed-indexed journals in the Europe PubMed Central database published from January 2020 to June 9, 2022. With a validated and automated tool, we detected transparent practices of three paper types: research articles, randomized controlled trials (RCTs), and reviews. Basic journal- and article-related information were retrieved from the database. We used R for the descriptive analyses.

Results: The total number of articles was 258,678, of which we were able to retrieve full texts of 186,157 (72%) articles from the database Over half of the papers (55.7%, n = 103,732) were research articles, 10.9% (n = 20,229) were review articles, and less than one percent (n = 1,202) were RCTs. Approximately nine-tenths of articles (in all three paper types) had a statement to disclose COI. Funding disclosure (83.9%, confidence interval (CI): 81.7-85.8 95%) and protocol registration (53.5%, 95% CI: 50.7-56.3) were more frequent in RCTs than in reviews or research articles. Reviews shared data (2.5%, 95% CI: 2.3-2.8) and code (0.4%, 95% CI: 0.4-0.5) less frequently than RCTs or research articles. Articles published in 2022 had the highest adherence to all five transparency practices. Most of the reviews (62%) and research articles (58%) adhered to two transparency practices, whereas almost half of the RCTs (47%) adhered to three practices. There were journal- and publisher-related differences in all five practices, and articles that did not adhere to transparency practices were more likely published in lowest impact journals and were less likely cited.

Conclusion: While most articles were freely available and had a COI disclosure, adherence to other transparent practices was far from acceptable. A much stronger commitment to open science practices, particularly to protocol registration, data and code sharing, is needed from all stakeholders.

Copyright: © 2023 Sofi-Mahmudi et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

COVID-19* / epidemiology
Conflict of Interest
Disclosure
Europe
Humans
Publications

Grants and funding

The computational analyses were performed on servers provided by UEF Bioinformatics Center, University of Eastern Finland, Finland. Uribe was supported by European Union’s Horizon 2020 grant 857287 for the Baltic Biomaterials Centre of Excellence, Headquarters at Riga Technical University, Riga, Latvia and the Uzņēmuma MikroTik līgumam Nr. UL8, 2021 RSU (toward implementing the RSU data repository and the FAIR data management principles). Raittio was supported by the Finnish Dental Society Apollonia and the Aarhus University Research Foundation (#AUFF-E 2019-7-3).