Impact of hype on clinicians' evaluation of trials - a pilot study.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to determine the practicality of using a teleconferencing platform to assess the effect of hype on clinicians' evaluations of reports of clinical trials in spinal care.

Methods: Twelve chiropractic clinicians were interviewed via a videoconferencing application. Interviews were recorded and timed. Participant behaviour was monitored for compliance with the protocol. Differences between participants numerical ratings of hyped and non-hyped abstracts based on four measures of quality were analysed using pairwise comparisons (Wilcoxon signed rank test for independent samples). In addition, a linear mixed effects model was fitted with condition (i.e. hype vs. no hype) as a fixed effect and participant and abstract as random effects.

Results: The interviews and data analysis were conducted without significant technical difficulty. Participant compliance was high, and no harms were reported. There were no statistically significant differences in the quality rankings of hyped versus non-hyped abstracts.

Conclusion: The use of a videoconferencing platform to measure the effects of hype on clinicians' evaluations of abstracts of clinical trials is practical and an adequately powered study is justified. Lack of statistically significant results may well be due to low participant numbers.