Top 20 on the BMJ

With thanks to Bradley Flansbaum @BradleyFlansbau for pointing this out on Twitter, the BMJs voted top twenty papers for the last twenty years.

Here is one of my favorites:

Seeing what you want to see in randomised controlled trials: versions and perversions of UKPDS data 

Randomised controlled trials are objective, free of bias, and produce robust conclusions about the benefits and risks of treatment, and clinicians should be trained to rely on them; so says the gospel of evidence based practice. In this article we argue, using the United Kingdom prospective diabetes study (UKPDS) as an example, that there is one stage in the conduct of a randomised controlled trial—the interpretation and dissemination of results—that is open to several biases that can seriously distort the conclusions. By bias, we mean the epidemiological definition: anything that systematically distorts the comparisons between groups. We will argue that certain biases arise when different stakeholders assign their individual values to the interpretation of the final results of randomised controlled trials.