Ivan Buljan

Background/Objectives: Patients with adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS) are at increased risk of emotional distress, yet little is known about the immediate psychological impact of receiving the diagnosis itself. This study aimed to evaluate short-term changes in self-esteem, anxiety, depression, and stress before and after AIS diagnosis, and in the early post-diagnostic period. Methods: In this cohort study, 179 adolescents (10–18 years) referred for suspected AIS completed the Rosenberg self-esteem scale (RSES) and Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS 21) before clinical and radiographic assessment (T1). Based on clinical findings and Cobb angle measurements, participants were classified as having mild scoliosis (Cobb angle > 10°, 20°), candidates for bracing treatment (Group B, n = 30), or no scoliosis (Group C, n = 119). Adolescents with scoliosis (Groups A and B) repeated the questionnaires immediately after diagnosis and treatment recommendations (T2). Group B completed a third assessment 1–2 months after initial examination (T3). Results: At baseline, RSES and DASS 21 scores did not differ significantly between groups. Following diagnostic disclosure, Group A showed a significant decline in self-esteem, while both groups showed increases in stress, anxiety, and depression. In Group B, reassessed at T3, stress and anxiety decreased, whereas depression remained elevated relative to baseline. Conclusions: AIS diagnosis was associated with a self-esteem decline that followed a pattern dependent on curve severity, with an immediate drop in mild AIS (Group A) versus a delayed decline emerging one to two months later in moderate/severe cases (Group B). Anxiety and depressive symptoms increased significantly in both groups, while stress increased significantly only in those with moderate/severe scoliosis (Group B). Routine screening of mental health after AIS diagnosis, alongside interdisciplinary care involving mental health professionals, may help identify vulnerable patients and enable timely psychosocial support.

Background: Research reproducibility – the ability of others to independently verify scientific findings by following the same methods and data – is a fundamental aspect of research integrity. When this fails, trust in evidence is undermined and research resources are wasted. Reproducibility measures describe the standards that define reproducible research, and reproducibility interventions are the actions used to improve those standards. There is little agreement on which practices and initiatives should be prioritised for implementation in practice. This study aimed to establish expert consensus on the key measures and interventions that should be prioritised to strengthen research reproducibility. Methods: We conducted a Delphi consensus study as part of the EU Horizon Europe iRISE project. Experts from five stakeholder groups (researchers, editors, publishers, funders, and policymakers) evaluated reproducibility measures and interventions identified through prior literature mapping across two online survey rounds, followed by a final virtual consensus panel. Items were rated on a 10-point Likert scale, with consensus defined a priori as agreement by at least 70% of panellists assigning high-priority scores, corresponding to scores of eight to ten on the Likert scale. Results: Seventy-three panellists from 34 countries participated in the first round, with high retention rates in the subsequent round. Consensus was achieved on eight reproducibility measures and six reproducibility interventions in the first round. Prioritised measures included methodological quality, reporting quality, code and data availability and reuse, computational reproducibility, transparency of research plan, reproducible workflow practices, trial registration, and materials availability and reuse. Prioritised interventions included data management training, data quality checks/feedback, statistical training, data sharing policy/guidelines, protocol/trial registration, and reproducible code/analysis training. Conclusions: The prioritised measures and interventions provide a structured foundation for improving research reproducibility across disciplines. The findings can inform the development of institutional training curricula in data management and statistical methods, policies supporting data sharing and trial registration, and future empirical evaluation of these practices across research contexts.

Aim: This mixed methods study investigates international researchers’ awareness and use of open research practices and explores variations across regions, disciplines, methodologies, and career stages. Methods: A total of 3,017 researchers across 45 countries and 24 disciplines completed the Brief Open Research Survey, reporting their awareness and use of eleven common open research practices and factors that would support their adoption. Results: Across the sample, respondents reported high awareness of Open Access Publications, Preprints, and Open Data and awareness only fell below 50% for Research Co-production and Registered Reports. Use was high for Open Access Publications, but fell below 50% for Preprints, Open Data, Open Research, Open Materials, Open Peer Review, Open Code, Preregistration, Research Co-production, Replication, and Registered Reports. Awareness and use varied across the sampled regions (e.g., Europe vs. Asia), disciplines (e.g., Psychology vs. Physical Sciences), methodologies (e.g., quantitative vs. qualitative), and career stages (e.g., PhD students vs. Professors). Respondents reported that the top five supportive strategies were incentives from funders, institutions and regulators; dedicated funding; recognition in promotion and recruitment criteria; more training; and more information. Qualitative responses provide insight into challenges and opportunities. Conclusions: Estimates of awareness can guide training initiatives, while estimates of use can inform policy development and longitudinal evaluations of behaviour change. Variations between regions, disciplines, methodologies, and career stages should be acknowledged.

Background: Cochrane plain language summaries (PLSs) aim to make systematic review findings more accessible to the general public. However, inconsistencies in how conclusions are presented may impact comprehension and decision-making. Classifying PLSs based on conclusiveness can improve clarity and facilitate informed health decisions. Objective: This study aimed to develop and evaluate deep learning language models for the classification of PLSs according to 3 levels of conclusiveness (conclusive, inconclusive, and unclear) and to compare their performance with a general-purpose large language model (GPT-4o). Methods: We used a publicly available dataset containing 4405 Cochrane PLSs of systematic reviews published until 2019, already classified by humans according to 9 categories of conclusiveness regarding the intervention’s effectiveness or safety. We merged these categories into 3 classes based on the strength of conclusiveness: conclusive, inconclusive, and unclear. For the fine-tuning, we used Scientific Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (SciBERT), a pretrained language model trained on 1.14 million papers primarily from the health sciences, and Longformer, a transformer model designed specifically to process long documents. The script was developed using the Python programming language and the PyTorch framework. We computed evaluation metrics using the scikit-learn machine learning library and determined the area under the curve of the receiver operating characteristic (AUCROC) to measure the model performance in balancing sensitivity and specificity. We also analyzed a separate set of 213 PLSs and compared the predictions of our pretrained models with both manual verification and outputs generated by ChatGPT. Results: The model based on SciBERT achieved a balanced accuracy of 56.6%. The AUCROC was 0.91 for “conclusive,” 0.67 for “inconclusive,” and 0.75 for “unclear” conclusiveness classes. The Longformer-based model had a balanced accuracy of 60.9%, with AUCROCs of 0.86 for “conclusive,” 0.67 for “inconclusive,” and 0.72 for “unclear” conclusiveness classes. Both models underperformed compared with ChatGPT, which demonstrated higher accuracy (74.2%), better precision and recall, and a higher Cohen κ (0.57). Conclusions: Fine-tuning 2 transformer-based language models showed mixed results in classifying Cochrane PLSs by conclusiveness, likely due to semantic overlap and subtle linguistic differences. Despite satisfactory internal test metrics, the fine-tuned models failed to generalize to newly published PLSs, where performance dropped to near-chance levels. These findings suggest that general-purpose large language models like GPT-4o may currently offer more reliable results for practical classification tasks in biomedical applications.

Aim: To determine whether playing video games with microtransactions is a predictor of higher scores on the SouthOaks Gambling Screen: Revised for Adolescents (SOGS-RA) questionnaire, and whether playing specific video gamesincreases the tendency to gamble or if another factor is involved.Methods: In this cross-sectional study, participants completed an online SOGS-RA questionnaire and answered questionsabout their gaming habits, such as how much money they had spent, how many games they had played, and howmuch time they had spent playing. We analysed the data using Spearman’s correlation coefficient and linear regression.Results: Two hundred and eight people completed the questionnaire, with three responses deemed invalid and excluded.Of the remaining participants, 180 reported playing video games with microtransactions. There was no significantassociation between playing specific video games and higher SOGS-RA scores (ρ = −0.01, P > 0.05). The most frequentlymentioned video games with microtransactions were not correlated with higher gambling tendencies. Although someparticipants who reported spending more money on microtransactions also had higher SOGS-RA scores, there was noindication of a strong predictive relationship between video games and gambling behavior (ρ = 0.17, P < 0.01).Conclusion: Gambling using video games was not linked to any specific video game, but rather to another factor thathas yet to be identified.

Medical residents are among the most vulnerable healthcare workers making their job satisfaction a critical factor influencing mental health, quality of care, and retention. This study examines how resilience and perfectionism are associated with job satisfaction among Croatian medical residents, with particular attention to perfectionism’s mediating role in these relationships. In a cross-sectional study, 148 residents (79.1% female; median age 30 years, IQR 29–32) completed an online survey between April and May 2024. Snowball sampling was conducted via closed social media groups for residents. Instruments included validated Croatian versions of the Brief Resilience Scale, the Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale, and the Index of Job Satisfaction. Participants were most frequently in their third year of training (Md = 3, IQR = 2–4); the most common specialty was anesthesiology (n = 17). Concern about mistakes, a maladaptive dimension of perfectionism, was negatively correlated with resilience (r = -0.476, p < 0.001) and job satisfaction (r = -0.375, p < 0.001). Regression analysis identified concern about mistakes as the sole predictor of job satisfaction (adjusted R2 = 0.112). Mediation analysis showed that concern about mistakes partially mediated the relationship between resilience and job satisfaction. Other perfectionism dimensions were not significant predictors. This study found that concern about mistakes, a maladaptive form of perfectionism, mediated the relationship between resilience and job satisfaction among Croatian medical residents. Other perfectionism dimensions were not significant predictors. These findings highlight maladaptive perfectionism as a key factor influencing resident resilience and job satisfaction.

Introduction: Adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS) presents not only physical but also psychological challenges for affected patients, frequently requiring comprehensive management that includes psychological interventions. Accurate and transparent reporting of interventions is essential to support reproducibility, facilitate clinical translation, and advance research quality. However, the completeness of intervention reporting and adherence to standardized guidelines in published studies on psychological interventions for pediatric AIS patients remains unclear. Methods: We searched Medline, PsycINFO, and Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) for studies involving psychological interventions in AIS. Intervention reporting was analyzed using the Template for Intervention Description and Replication (TIDieR) checklist. Adherence to reporting guidelines was assessed for different study designs. Results: We identified 18 studies, which had suboptimal reporting of interventions. For key TIDieR items, all studies reported the brief name and rationale, but completeness for other elements varied: methods (14/18 studies), materials (10/18), provider (6/18), and mode of delivery (8/18) were described inconsistently. Setting was reported in only 3/18 studies, whereas the details about tailoring, modifications, and fidelity were largely lacking or deemed non-applicable. For eight randomized trials, several critical CONSORT items, such as trial design, randomization procedures, blinding, and trial registration were often unreported. Among five observational studies, reporting of STROBE key elements such as study design, setting, eligibility criteria, and funding was more consistent, but methods addressing bias, participant flow, missing data, and category boundaries for variables were largely insufficient. Similar gaps were observed for relevant TREND checklist items for nonrandomized intervention studies. Conclusions: The reporting of psychological interventions for AIS in the literature is frequently incomplete, especially for intervention details essential for the reproducibility of the intervention and assessment of risk of bias. Adoption of standardized reporting guidelines is necessary to improve intervention transparency, replicability, and translation into clinical practice. Future research should focus on prospective evaluations of reporting guideline implementation and its impact on research quality in this field.

Background Traditional instruction in rules and system of research conduct cannot capture the unique and complex situations involved in ethics choices and actions, but engagement with art may facilitate deeper understanding and discussion of these issues. In this case study, we explored the value of an art exercise incorporated into research integrity (RI) training based on the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity, including research misconduct. Methods At the end of a summer school on responsible research, we held an art session where the participants, all of whom are also authors of this article, painted a picture to illustrate their perspective on research integrity. They also completed a demographic data survey and provided a short description for their painting. We qualitatively analysed the motives of the drawings and quantitatively analysed the sentiment of the essays corresponding to the paintings Results Most authors came from biomedical sciences and were academic researchers, predominantly women (13 out of 19 participants). The titles of paintings ranged from ambiguous (e.g., “Circles” or “Equilibrium”) to more specific (e.g., “The temptation of image manipulation”). Some paintings were abstract, while others fit the representational art framework. Several paintings depicted research graphs and images, while others depicted themes from nature – flowers, beaches, and trees. Motives of conflict and balance were frequent. In the descriptions of the paintings, authors associated their paintings with classical research integrity themes such as morality, transparency, and data manipulation, as well as with personal experiences with research integrity dilemmas. The sentiment of the text was predominantly positive and trusting. Conclusion Using art in teaching research integrity may be a good way to stimulate introspection and discussion about research integrity, as well as to improve understanding of how researchers perceive the concept of research integrity.