Compellingness: assessing the practical relevance of clinical research results.

While the critical appraisal of clinical research has generally focused on aspects of study design and statistical analysis, other features of clinical studies appear to be more important to clinicians for assessing the value of a particular study in the care of particular patients. These features relate to the quality of the knowledge derived from the research, the value of the results to the care of individual patients, and the responsibility of clinicians to be stewards of limited resources. Twelve features of clinical research studies that affect how compelling individual clinicians find the results are proposed and examined here. By better understanding what makes clinical research compelling enough to alter or reinforce clinical practice, clinical researchers can design future studies to better serve the needs of clinicians and patients.