Cochrane, an organisation providing evidence to support decision making in medicine, announced the call for nominations for their annual REWARD prizes, acknowledging "initiatives that have potential to reduce research waste". Research waste occurs when results of a study cannot be used in practice, especially in medical practice, and thus the money, time and effort put into the study is wasted. The mistakes leading to waste can be made at each stage of the research process, for example the researchers can choose a wrong question to begin with, or write up the results in a way that makes them incomprehensible. Last year, the REWARD prizes were given to:
- The UK Equator Centre, for its Good Reports tool, referring writers to the appropriate reporting guidelines and running the checklists for them;
- The EBM DataLab, for its Trials Tracker initiative, tracking if all registered clinical trials publish results, as they are obliged to;
- The James Lind Alliance, for its Priority Setting Partnerships, bringing together patients and researchers at the moment of the trial design, so that the patients' needs are directly addressed in the questions being asked.
The 2019 call is open until 5 June, and the winners will be announced later in October.
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