Re:The Mars company has sponsored hundreds of studies to sho...
by carbocation on Wednesday October 18, 2017 @04:02PM
(#15502440)
Yours is a good description of publication bias. I think it's worth mentioning that funnel plots can give you a visual sense of whether there is publication bias, and tools such as Egger regression can help to try to tease out a less biased estimate in the face of publication bias.
Due to random chance, you'll sometimes get positive results, and sometimes get negative results. If all of those studies are published, then there isn't a huge problem -- a metastudy would show that on average cocoa doesn't affect health.
But instead, support that only the positive studies are published. A third party reviewing the relevant literature will assume that all studies conducted showed a positive result, when in fact they were only the studies that were published.
This is the problem with having sponsored research: the research itself can be done properly, but a bias in publishing can give an inaccurate view of the true science at hand.