To cite the article below: “Low reproducibility rates within life science research undermine cumulative knowledge production“. Wound care research provides an excellent example. Quoting the EWMA Study Recommendations for clinical investigations in leg ulcers and wound care (2014) “However, we are all aware that the quality of many studies in this field remains poor and we would be doing a disservice as the European Wound Management Association if we did not encourage our members to join in the challenge of raising the quality of studies for the benefit of our patients.” This is 2015!
Wound care research more than often (def)end inconclusive articles with the phrase : “more research is needed”. The result may be inconclusive but the expert opinion is not, research was flawed because it does not proved the result the author was expecting based upon his or her expert opinion. In this little sentence you may already feel the importance of the expert opinion. It is interesting to notice meta analyses with conclusive results are put aside to the benefit of expert opinions. The expert opinion is leading in wound care. This means the wound care specialist concludes the meta analyses are based on wrong data and prefer their own opinion (expert opinion).
The “expert opinion” leads to the following observation: either it is impossible to do wound care research or we have a massive logical error preventing us to come up with widely accepted meta analyses. Anyway, following the international guidelines meta analyses are leading, not the expert opinion. But no matter who is right, in 2015 we still are using the same paradigms as in 1943.
So the conclusion of this article is valid for wound care; yes, there has been no cumulative knowledge production in wound care. (for 70 years)
Freedman LP, Cockburn IM, Simcoe TS (2015) The Economics of Reproducibility in Preclinical Research. PLoS Biol 13(6): e1002165. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1002165
http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002165
http://ewma.org/english/publications/ewma-documents-and-articles/ewma-study-recommendations.html
E L Howes. The rate and nature of epithelization in wounds with loss of substance SGO 1943 Vol 76 (738-745)
below are two random articles, feel free to do your own research…
http://www.woundsresearch.com/article/real-world-experience-decellularized-dehydrated-human-amniotic-membrane-allograft
http://www.magonlinelibrary.com/doi/10.12968/jowc.2015.24.6.245