Causal language and strength of inference in academic and media articles shared in social media (CLAIMS): A systematic review

PloS One
Noah HaberCLAIMS research team

Abstract

The pathway from evidence generation to consumption contains many steps which can lead to overstatement or misinformation. The proliferation of internet-based health news may encourage selection of media and academic research articles that overstate strength of causal inference. We investigated the state of causal inference in health research as it appears at the end of the pathway, at the point of social media consumption. We screened the NewsWhip Insights database for the most shared media articles on Facebook and Twitter reporting about peer-reviewed academic studies associating an exposure with a health outcome in 2015, extracting the 50 most-shared academic articles and media articles covering them. We designed and utilized a review tool to systematically assess and summarize studies' strength of causal inference, including generalizability, potential confounders, and methods used. These were then compared with the strength of causal language used to describe results in both academic and media articles. Two randomly assigned independent reviewers and one arbitrating reviewer from a pool of 21 reviewers assessed each article. We accepted the most shared 64 media articles pertaining to 50 academic articles for review, repres...Continue Reading

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Citations

Jan 17, 2019·European Journal of Epidemiology·Jørn Olsen, Uffe Juul Jensen
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Software Mentioned

ROBINS
NewsWhip Insights
R
NewsWhip
NewsWhip [UNK]
PRISMA
CLAIMS
I 0

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