Glossary of terms
Breif descriptoins of the some key, but perhaps unfamiliar, terms used in this guide.
Term | Definition |
Adaptive Platform Trial Design | A clinical trial setup allowing for the adjustment of treatments being tested—such as adding new ones or removing ineffective ones—based on ongoing results. |
Bayesian Analysis | A statistical method that updates the probability for a hypothesis as more evidence becomes available. |
Clinical Trial | A research study conducted with human volunteers to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of a medical, surgical, or behavioural intervention. |
Concurrently Randomised Controls | Participants in a clinical trial assigned to a control or comparison group at the same time as others are assigned to the experimental or treatment group. |
Control (in a clinical trial) | A group of participants that does not receive the experimental treatment being tested. This group may receive no treatment, a standard treatment, or a placebo to compare the effects of the experimental treatment against. |
Ethics Committee | A group that reviews research proposals to ensure that they are ethically acceptable and that participants' rights and welfare are protected. |
Futility | A term used in clinical trials to describe a treatment's failure to show a significant beneficial effect compared to a control group. |
Hazard Ratio | A statistic that quantifies the chance of an event happening at any given time in one group compared to another. |
Informed Consent | A process by which participants are given comprehensive information about a research study (including potential risks and benefits) and voluntarily agree to participate. |
Median | One way of calculating an ‘average’. The middle value in a list of numbers, ensuring that half the numbers are below it and half are above. |
Nocebo Effect | Negative effects experienced by a patient which are attributed to the patient's expectations rather than the treatment itself. |
Non-Concurrently Randomised Controls | Participants assigned to a control group before the introduction of participants to a new treatment group within a trial. |
Peer Review | The process by which a scientific work is evaluated by a group of experts in the same field to assess its suitability for publication or funding. |
Placebo | A treatment with no therapeutic effect, used as a control in testing new drugs. |
Pragmatic Real-World Evaluation | A type of clinical study designed to test the effectiveness of interventions in real-life routine practice conditions, rather than under controlled clinical trial conditions. |
Preprint | An early version of a research paper made available before peer review and publication in a scientific journal. |
Primary Outcome | The main result that a clinical trial is designed to measure to determine the effect of the intervention on the participants. |
Protocol | A document that describes the objective(s), design, methodology, statistical considerations, and organisation of a clinical trial. |
Randomisation | The process of randomly assigning trial participants to different groups, such as the experimental group (receiving the treatment under investigation) or the control group, to reduce bias. |
Repurposed Drugs | Medications that are already approved for one condition but are being tested for effectiveness against another condition. |
Secondary Outcome | Additional effects of the intervention being studied in a clinical trial, which are not the main focus but are still of interest. |
Sensitivity Analysis | A method to test how different conditions affect outcomes in an analysis. |
Statistical Threshold | A predetermined point at which a result is considered statistically significant, indicating it is unlikely to have occurred by chance. |