A Grading System To Evaluate Objectively the Strength of Pre-Clinical Data of Acute Neuroprotective Therapies for Clinical Translation in Spinal Cord Injury
The past three decades have seen an explosion of research interest in spinal cord injury (SCI) and the development of hundreds of potential therapies that have demonstrated some promise in pre-clinical experimental animal models. A growing number of these treatments are seeking to be translated into human clinical trials. Conducting such a clinical trial, however, is extremely costly, not only for the time and money required to execute it, but also for the limited resources that will then no longer be available to evaluate other promising therapies. The decision about what therapies have sufficient pre-clinical evidence of efficacy to justify testing in humans is therefore of utmost importance. Here, we have developed a scoring system for objectively grading the body of pre-clinical literature on neuroprotective treatments for acute SCI. The components of the system include an evaluation of a number of factors that are thought to be important in considering the "robustness" of a therapy's efficacy, including the animal species and injury models that have been used to test it, the time window of efficacy, the types of functional improvements effected by it, and whether efficacy has been independently replicated. The selection of these factors was based on the results of a questionnaire that was performed within the SCI research community. A modified Delphi consensus-building exercise was then conducted with experts in pre-clinical SCI research to refine the criteria and decide upon how to score them. Finally, the grading system was applied to a series of potential neuroprotective treatments for acute SCI. This represents a systematic approach to developing an objective method of evaluating the extent to which the pre-clinical literature supports the translation of a particular experimental treatment into human trials.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 4. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 05 January 2021.
All research outputs
#8,976,377
of 30,028,155 outputs
Outputs from Journal of Neurotrauma
#1,186
of 3,033 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#46,667
of 143,139 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Journal of Neurotrauma
#16
of 31 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 30,028,155 research outputs across all sources so far. This one has received more attention than most of these and is in the 68th percentile.
So far Altmetric has tracked 3,033 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 10.7. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 60% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 143,139 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 65% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 31 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one is in the 45th percentile – i.e., 45% of its contemporaries scored the same or lower than it.
