You are here

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
Editorial
Research, urban myths and the never ending story
  1. Tim J Gabbett1,2,
  2. Peter Blanch3,4
  1. 1 Gabbett Performance Solutions, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
  2. 2 Institute for Resilient Regions, University of Southern Queensland, Ipswich, Queensland, Australia
  3. 3 School of Allied Health Sciences, Griffith University, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia
  4. 4 Brisbane Lions Australian Football Club, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
  1. Correspondence to Dr Tim J Gabbett, Gabbett Performance Solutions, Brisbane, Qld 4011, Australia; tim{at}gabbettperformance.com.au

https://doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2017-098439

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    A changing world

    In the modern technological age, practitioners are exposed to a wealth of information from many diverse sources. Social media has resulted in rapid distribution of research evidence. As soon as an article appears on the journal website, those with the fastest fingers and thumbs will have the paper ‘posted’, ‘tweeted’ or ‘blogged’. Without doubt, social media has assisted researchers to distribute their findings to (hopefully) enhance translation to the ‘real world’. But how well does a single 140-character ‘tweet’ encapsulate the findings of a complete research study (which may range from 3000 to 5000 words)?

    The cyclical continuum of evidence

    Often research evidence is equivocal; for every study there will be another study reporting an opposing view, and quite often, factors other than empirical evidence shape our beliefs.1 Wherever possible, practitioners should examine their beliefs and the sources those beliefs are formed upon. We should try to ascertain what is a hypothesis, what is evidence (myth, story, empirical), and based on the strength of the hypothesis or evidence, how much weight should be placed on each. Below, we have provided some examples of how people obtain information and …

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Contributors TJG drafted the original paper. PB provided feedback on subsequent drafts.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.