Reporting bias

In epidemiology, reporting bias is defined as "selective revealing or suppression of information" by subjects (for example about past medical history, smoking, sexual experiences). In artificial intelligence research, the term reporting bias is used to refer to people's tendency to under-report all the information available.

In empirical research, the term may be used to refer to authors under-reporting unexpected or undesirable experimental results, attributing the results to sampling or measurement error, while being more trusting of expected or desirable results, though these may be subject to the same sources of error. In this context, reporting bias can eventually lead to a status quo where multiple investigators discover and discard the same results, and later experimenters justify their own reporting bias by observing that previous experimenters reported different results. Thus, each incident of reporting bias can make future incidents more likely. Sociologist Christopher B. Doob refers to this practice as selective reporting in explaining the Power of the Press and defines it as biased coverage of news issues that promotes corporate interests and downplays, denigrates, or ignores issues and groups challenging these issues.

Research can only contribute to knowledge if it is communicated from investigators to the community. The generally accepted primary means of communication is “full” publication of the study methods and results in an article published in a scientific journal. Sometimes, investigators choose to present their findings at a scientific meeting as well, either through an oral or poster presentation. These presentations are included as part of the scientific record as brief “abstracts” which may or may not be recorded in publicly accessible documents typically found in libraries or the World Wide Web.

Sometimes, investigators fail to publish the results of entire studies. The Declaration of Helsinki [1] and other consensus documents have outlined the ethical obligation to make results from clinical research publicly available.

Reporting bias occurs when the dissemination of research findings is influenced by the nature and direction of the results. Positive results is a commonly used term to describe a study finding that one intervention is better than another.

Various attempts have been made to overcome the effects of the reporting biases, including statistical adjustments to the results of published studies. None of these approaches has proved satisfactory, however, and there is increasing acceptance that reporting biases must be tackled by establishing registers of controlled trials and by promoting good publication practice. Until these problems have been addressed, estimates of the effects of treatments based on published evidence may be biased.

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