The RSS Manchester local group will host an online seminar with Dr Jack Wilkinson (senior lecturer in the Centre for Biostatistics at the University of Manchester) who will discuss methods for assessing the trustworthiness of clinical trials with and without access to the individual participant data.

As statisticians, we are used to assessing the methodological quality of research. We are perhaps less used to questioning the authenticity of said work. Unfortunately, it is now clear that many published health research studies are “problematic”. This term is used to describe studies that are subject to research misconduct (data falsification, fabrication, or plagiarism) or else suffer from honest but critical errors that compromise the integrity of the data or results. Techniques to recognise problematic studies should become part of the statistician’s toolkit.

Dr Wilkinson will present methods for assessing the trustworthiness of clinical trials with and without access to the individual participant data, and will describe our efforts to create a series of tools (INSPECT-SR, INSPECT-IPD) for this purpose. Methods for trustworthiness assessment are new to almost all of us working in health research, and he will argue that we have a responsibility to promote sound methods for this purpose.