Transparency in Reporting Results From Randomized Clinical Trials

Author Biographies

• Robert M. Kaplan, Stanford University

  Robert M. Kaplan has served as Chief Science Officer at the US Agency for Health Care Research and Quality (AHRQ) and Associate Director of the National Institutes of Health, where he led the behavioral and social sciences programs.  He is also a Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Health Services and Medicine at UCLA, where he led the UCLA/RAND AHRQ health services training program and the UCLA/RAND CDC Prevention Research Center. He was Chair of the Department of Health Services from 2004 to 2009.  From 1997 to 2004 he was Professor and Chair of the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, at the University of California, San Diego. He is a past President of several organizations, including the American Psychological Association Division of Health Psychology, Section J of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (Pacific), the International Society for Quality of Life Research, the Society for Behavioral Medicine, and the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research. Kaplan is a former Editor-in-Chief of Health Psychologyand of the Annals of Behavioral Medicine.  His 20 books and over 530 articles or chapters have been cited more than 37,000 times (H-index>100) and the ISI includes him in the listing of the most cited authors in his field (defined as above the 99.5th percentile). Kaplan was elected to the National Academy of Medicine (formerly the Institute of Medicine) in 2005.  He is currently Director of Research at the Stanford School of Medicine Clinical Excellence Research Center (CERC).  

• Veronica Irvin, Oregon State University
  Dr. Irvin is an Assistant Professor at OSU and is currently studying the idea that how medical and science information is presented can change someone’s behavior. Her first project assesses health literacy and communication methods in order to better understand how people manage their health. In her second project, she evaluates the content of information on clinical websites and consent forms in terms of accuracy, reading level and sentiment. For both studies, the goal is to understand how people make decisions from this information and how it impacts their health. Lastly, she investigate how scientists present their results to other scientists. In her paper in Plos One 2015, Dr. Irvin and her colleagues suggest that the adoption of new transparent reporting standards may have contributed to a significant reduction in the percentage of studies reporting positive research findings among large-budget clinical trials funded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. The culture of science is evolving to become more open and transparent and she measure various outcomes affected by these new policies and norms.