A study published in 2009 estimated that 85% of research conducted is wasted. This waste represents tens of billions of Euros spent each year on studies that are redundant, flawed in their design, never published or poorly reported. The public is the main victim of this waste. If clinical research is not adequately planned, conducted and reported, clinicians are prevented from using effective health interventions in practice and researchers from adequately prioritizing future research questions. This situation ultimately has a detrimental impact on patient care. Therefore, reducing waste and increasing value of research represents a major societal challenge.
Our aim is to create an innovative and ambitious multidisciplinary intersectoral joint doctoral training programme in Europe dedicated to Methods in Research on Research (MiRoR) in the field of clinical research. “Research on Research (RoR)” is an emerging new scientific discipline that aims to reduce waste in research and increase research value.
MiRoR brings together 7 world-class research teams in various disciplines (computer sciences, applied mathematics, biostatistics, bioinformatics, clinical epidemiology, psychology, social sciences and translational medicine) from 6 different European countries; 6 non-academic partners involved in diverse sectors, and 4 major academic partners. We tackle several steps of a clinical research project (planning, conduct, reporting and the peer-review); various study designs (observational studies, randomised trials, systematic reviews); and various study questions (therapeutic, diagnostic, and prognostic evaluation) using various methods (scoping reviews, meta-epidemiologic studies, qualitative studies, experimental studies, simulations etc).
Our project involving 15 early-stage researchers aims to: 1) Prepare students for envisioning the future challenges in clinical research and find innovative solutions to face them; 2)Train students to go beyond the state-of-the-art in their research; 3) Help students think differently, taking advantage of the multidisciplinary expertise and intercultural diversity of the network; 4) Teach students how to move from research to action and convert knowledge and ideas into a product; 5) Help students develop skills to match the public and private sector needs and create new professional opportunities.