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Statistics: The Problem of Examining Accumulating Data More Than Once
Abstract
A RECURRING decision that has to be made in planning a controlled clinical trial of a new treatment is the size of the patient sample necessary. In this decision, a major determinant is ethical, for the investigator must keep at a minimum the number of patients exposed and the duration of the exposure to the inferior treatment. To achieve this ethical goal, the investigator may be tempted to analyze his results repeatedly as data accumulate. Just such a procedure was apparently used in a study recently reported in the Journal.1 , 2 Yet, as my communication will show, the use of conventionally . . .
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Cited by
Peto, R., Pike, M. C., Armitage, P., Breslow, N. E., Cox, D. R., Howard, S. V., Mantel, N., McPherson, K., Peto, J., & Smith, P. G. (1976) · British Journal of Cancer · doi:10.1038/bjc.1976.220 · Cited by 2,294
Self-citationPublication bias—a problem in interpreting medical data
Begg, C. B., & Berlin, J. A. (1988) · Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A (Statistics in Society) · doi:10.2307/2982993 · Cited by 814
Bayesian approaches to randomized trials
Spiegelhalter, D. J., Freedman, L. S., & Parmar, M. K. B. (1994) · Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A (Statistics in Society) · doi:10.2307/2983527 · Cited by 720
The Dublin randomized controlled trial of intrapartum fetal heart rate monitoring
MacDonald, D., Grant, A., Sheridan-Pereira, M., Boylan, P., & Chalmers, I. (1985) · American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology · doi:10.1016/0002-9378(85)90619-2 · Cited by 631
Pogue, J. M., & Yusuf, S. (1997) · Controlled Clinical Trials · doi:10.1016/s0197-2456(97)00051-2 · Cited by 415
Metadata
- Authors
- McPherson, K.
- Venue
- New England Journal of Medicine
- Publisher
- Massachusetts Medical Society
- Published
- 1974-02-28
- Volume
- 290
- Issue
- 9
- Pages
- 501-502
- ISSN
- 0028-4793 (ISSN-L)
- 1533-4406
- OpenAlex
- W2064859316
- Cited by
- 183
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 4.47
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
