Classification and prevalence of spin in abstracts of non-randomized studies evaluating an intervention.

For example, we considered linguistic spin frequent when authors indicated that the results were close to significance, despite a p-value > 0.05.

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This type of spin included 1) not reporting adverse events or lack of focus on harms (e.g., no warning on important safety issues), 2) selective reporting of outcomes favoring the beneficial effect of the experimental treatment (e.g., statistically significant results for efficacy outcomes or statistically non-significant results for harm outcomes), 3) misleading reporting of study design, 4) use of linguistic spin or “hype” (i.e., rhetorical manipulations to convince the readers of the beneficial effect of the treatment such as “excellent” results, “encouraging” outcome s , “a trend toward significance”), 5) no consideration of limitations, and 6) selective citation of other studies.

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