Propensity Scoring in Plastic Surgery Research: An Analysis and Best Practice Guide.

Randomized controlled trials, though considered the gold standard in clinical research, are often not feasible in plastic surgery research. Instead, researchers rely heavily on observational studies, leading to potential issues with confounding and selection bias. Propensity scoring-a statistical technique that estimates a patient's likelihood of having received the exposure of interest-can improve the comparability of study groups by either guiding the selection of study participants or generating a covariate that can be adjusted for in multivariate analyses.