Objective: Acknowledging study limitations in a scientific publication is a crucial element in scientific transparency and progress. However, limitation reporting is often inadequate. Natural language processing (NLP) methods could support automated reporting checks, improving research transparency. …

The rising rate of preprints and publications, combined with persistent inadequate reporting practices and problems with study design and execution, have strained the traditional peer review system. Automated screening tools could potentially enhance peer review by helping authors, journal editors, and …

Objective: To annotate a corpus of randomized controlled trial (RCT) publications with the checklist items of CONSORT reporting guidelines and using the corpus to develop text mining methods for RCT appraisal. Methods: We annotated a corpus of 50 RCT articles at the sentence level using 37 fine-grained …

Background: In their research reports, scientists are expected to discuss limitations that their studies have. Previous research showed that often, such discussion is absent. Also, many journals emphasize the importance of avoiding overstatement of claims. We wanted to see to what extent editorial handling …

Objective: To automatically recognize self-acknowledged limitations in clinical research publications to support efforts in improving research transparency. Methods: To develop our recognition methods, we used a set of 8431 sentences from 1197 PubMed Central articles. A subset of these sentences was …