Peer review

From Kelly Crowe at CBC: What gets clicks? Words like “breakthrough,” “groundbreaking,” “game changer” and “lifesaver.” And that’s how much of medical news is described. In one week last June, researchers counted 36 different cancer drugs being described using those superlatives. But when they took a closer look at the actual drugs, half were not yet approved as safe and effective, and some hadn’t even been tried on humans. … And there’s evidence of that hype being routinely amplified by reporters, scientists and scientific journals.More. Why does that remind us so much of hypotheses for the origin of life? The difference, of course, is that in this case, the research actually matters. See also: Scientists should publish less? and Authors: Read More ›

Or, we are warned, they will be “swamped by the ever-increasing volume of poor work.” Imagine, on the virtual heels of: Authors: There is a worrying amount of outright fraud in psychology (But, they say, it may be no more common than in other disciplines), we get this: From science policy analyst Daniel Sarewitz at Nature, Mainstream scientific leaders increasingly accept that large bodies of published research are unreliable. But what seems to have escaped general notice is a destructive feedback between the production of poor-quality science, the responsibility to cite previous work and the compulsion to publish. … More than 50 years ago, Price predicted that the scientific enterprise would soon have to go through a transition from exponential Read More ›

We’ve heard so much about the problems of psychology as a discipline in science. And as our own Jack Cole points out, psychologists may simply be more inclined to self-report. But a reader sent this one in from Tom Farsides and Paul Sparks at Britain’s Psychologist, and it merits a mention anyway: Opinion: Buried in bullshit … There is a worrying amount of outright fraud in psychology, even if it may be no more common than in other disciplines. Consider the roll call of those who have in recent years had high-status peer-reviewed papers retracted because of confirmed or suspected fraud: Marc Hauser, Jens Förster, Dirk Smeesters, Karen Ruggiero, Lawrence Sanna, Michael LaCour and, a long way in front with Read More ›

From U Penn psych prof James Coyne: Never confuse eminence-based with evidence-based, even if something’s coming with awards from big-name universities. – Robin N. Kok Good advice. Also I don’t know about you, but I get damned angry at the APS sacrificing its integrity and damaging itself as a trusted source by promoting this crap. This is not the first time that APS has let ithe public down with promotion of bad science that exploits people in need of credible psychological advice You just can’t interpret claims as being credible because they are endorsed by the APS. More. One wonders what science eminences would end up as patios if this advice were taken to heart. See also: First Things has Read More ›

Robbert Dijkgraaf muses on the barbarians at the gates of science at Nautilus: What does the evolving frontier of knowledge mean for society’s relationship with science? Long borders are difficult to patrol. Professional gatekeepers of scientific knowledge can no longer control the flow of information as they used to. In an age of the “University of Google,” people no longer rely on established, peer-reviewed literature but rather seek out manifold sources on the Internet. Fragments of scientific knowledge get absorbed into society this way, as do some scientific values and thinking—which by itself is good. But many of these fragmented bits of knowledge are also invalidated, politicized, and of dubious quality. Actually, a lot of what us rubes found has Read More ›

From Nature: Today, with the debate about the future of peer review more fraught than ever, it is crucial to understand the youth of this institution. What’s more, its workings and its imagined goals have evolved continually, and its current tensions bear the marks of this. The referee system has become a mishmash of practices, functions and values. But one thing stands out: pivotal moments in the history of peer review have occurred when the public status of science was being renegotiated. … Current attempts to reimagine peer review rightly debate the psychology of bias, the problem of objectivity, and the ability to gauge reliability and importance, but they rarely consider the multilayered history of this institution. Peer review did Read More ›

From Deborah Berry at The Conversation: In 2012, the biopharmaceutical company Amgen reported that it had been unable to reproduce 47 of 53 “landmark” cancer papers. For confidentiality reasons, however, the company did not release which papers it could not replicate and thus did not provide details about how it repeated the experiments. As with the psychology studies, this leaves the possibility that Amgen got different results because the experiments were not performed the same way as the original study. It opens the door to doubt about which result – the first or the repeat test – was correct. Several initiatives are addressing this problem in multiple disciplines. Science Exchange; the Center for Open Science, a group dedicated to “openness, integrity Read More ›

When Nature is giving you the advice, … you know there’s a problem and you better listen. There is no handbook that describes what to do in these situations. If you decide to be a whistle-blower, you must realize that it will be stressful. And because it is so stressful, you want to ensure that any investigations that are carried out will be robust. Every case needs to be considered on an individual basis, but I hope that sharing my recommendations will help others who find themselves in a similar position. But then, inexplicably: Avoid public disclosure. In my view, it is not appropriate to make public statements about such cases until they are resolved. It would have been much Read More ›

From Adam Marcus at Stat News: What do Henry Kissinger and Martin Scorsese have in common? Fun fact: Both evidently review scientific manuscripts for money. … The EditPub site (which seemed on Thursday to be no longer up and running), is almost entirely in Chinese, but its homepage bills it as a “service center for scientific research.” Its existence came to light earlier this month after the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology retracted a 2015 article by a group from Dalian University in China. According to the journal, EditPub had “compromised” the peer review process in a way that the journal has so far refused to make public. The retraction is but the latest in some 300 similar instances of Read More ›

Yes, even First Things. From software engineer William A. Wilson at First Things: If science was unprepared for the influx of careerists, it was even less prepared for the blossoming of the Cult of Science. The Cult is related to the phenomenon described as “scientism”; both have a tendency to treat the body of scientific knowledge as a holy book or an a-religious revelation that offers simple and decisive resolutions to deep questions. But it adds to this a pinch of glib frivolity and a dash of unembarrassed ignorance. Its rhetorical tics include a forced enthusiasm (a search on Twitter for the hashtag “#sciencedancing” speaks volumes) and a penchant for profanity. Here in Silicon Valley, one can scarcely go a Read More ›

By the rubes and the boobs and the bubbas, right? No, actually. From Charles Ornstein at Pacific Standard: A widely derided editorial, a controversial series of articles, and delayed corrections have prompted critics to question the direction of the New England Journal of Medicine. … In a widely derided editorial earlier this year, Dr. Jeffrey M. Drazen, the Journal’s editor-in-chief, and a deputy used the term “research parasites” to describe researchers who seek others’ data to analyze or replicate their studies, which many say is a crucial step in the scientific process. And last year, the Journal ran a controversial series saying concerns about conflicts of interest in medicine are oversimplified and overblown. More. The internet has, as so often, Read More ›

From Nature News: Operators of Internet repositories that provide illicit free access to millions of research papers seem determined to keep up their services, despite being barred by an injunction. A New York district court ruled on 28 October that online services such as Sci-Hub and the Library Genesis Project (Libgen) violate US copyright law. The court ruled in favour of academic publisher Elsevier, which in June filed a complaint against the main operators of the sites for unlawfully accessing and distributing its copyrighted papers. Sci-Hub downloads articles by aping university IP addresses and stores them in a repository that now contains more than 46 million papers. More. One possible solution would be to make all serious public science research Read More ›

Further to Scientists, data, and diet, from ScienceDaily: Butter might not be a health food, but researchers unearthed more evidence that replacing it with vegetable oils does not decrease risk of heart disease … A research team led by scientists at the UNC School of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health has unearthed more evidence that casts doubt on the traditional “heart healthy” practice of replacing butter and other saturated fats with corn oil and other vegetable oils high in linoleic acid. The findings, reported today in the British Medical Journal, suggest that using vegetable oils high in linoleic acid might be worse than using butter when it comes to preventing heart disease, though more research needs to be Read More ›

Over at PowerlineBlog, there’s a post about the newly released analysis of the diet proposed 40 years ago as the one to lead us to good health. But guess what? It turns out it wasn’t all that good for us. And the data pointing this out didn’t appear until just recently, but, instead, appeared years ago. But why publish data that conflicts with your beloved theory? They include these quotes from the Washington Post: “Incomplete publication has contributed to the overestimation of benefits and underestimation of potential risks” of the special diet, they wrote. But Broste suggested that at least part of the reason for the incomplete publication of the data might have been human nature. The Minnesota investigators had Read More ›

Last news cycle, skim milk was virtuous; now it’s just a fad. Meanwhile, from the Ian Leslie at the Guardian: If, as seems increasingly likely, the nutritional advice on which we have relied for 40 years was profoundly flawed, this is not a mistake that can be laid at the door of corporate ogres. Nor can it be passed off as innocuous scientific error. What happened to John Yudkin belies that interpretation. It suggests instead that this is something the scientists did to themselves – and, consequently, to us. We tend to think of heretics as contrarians, individuals with a compulsion to flout conventional wisdom. But sometimes a heretic is simply a mainstream thinker who stays facing the same way Read More ›