Current science; lack of blinding (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, May 27, 2015, 17:48 (3254 days ago) @ David Turell

Single blind and double blind removes observer bias almost completely. It seems there are many studies down without it:-http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fevo.2015.00051/full-"We surveyed 492 recent studies in the fields of ecology, evolution, and behavior (EEB) to evaluate potential for observer bias and the need for blind experimentation in each study. While 248 articles included experiments that could have been influenced by observer bias, only 13.3% of these articles indicated that experiments were blinded. The use of blind observation therefore was either grossly underreported in the surveyed articles, or many EEB studies were not blinded. We hope that a concerted effort of the field of EEB—including researchers, peer-reviewers, and journal editors—will help promote and institute routine, blind observation as an essential standard that should be practiced by all sciences.-***-"To remedy underreporting of blind experimentation, we recommend that EEB researchers report for each experiment whether a study was blinded (or not blinded), and explain how any blinding was accomplished (or explain why blinding was not possible). We also recommend that peer-reviewers and editors require accurate reporting of blinding in the methods section and require that authors reveal in their methods any unblinded experimentation. Such accurate reporting of methods will permit readers to gain a better understanding of the strengths of a study and should facilitate progress in future research building on published work. Finally, we recommend that editorial policies of journals require reporting of both blinded and unblinded observation, and that journals improve guidelines that assist peer-reviewers to evaluate the need for blind observation. We hope that a concerted effort of the field of EEB will soon follow the same routine and standardized use of blind experimentation as in other fields, stimulate a more critical reading of the published literature, and thus establish in the near future a firm tradition of blind experimentation in ecology, evolution, and behavior."