That’s an excellent point. How would the publisher, a middleman so to speak, know if the science or research they’re publishing is any good? The problem starts at the source. Whose work is it?
WSJ reported today that 19 scientific journals are closing due to widespread academic fraud.
free link:
Apparently it’s a $30 Billion fraud – that’s closing in on Medicare Advantage levels of fraud. {{ LOL }}
intercst
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Well, the publisher is supposed to be checking the science before publishing. So they key is to take a bit of a dive into the publisher and the journal.
First up is the publisher. Many good science journals don’t use an outside publisher. They are basically self-published, typically by some kind of sister organization. For example, the New England Journal of Medicine is published by the Massachusetts Medical Society, which I believe publishes only three other journals - all related to medicine. The less scrupulous publishers publish a lot of things on a wide variety of unrelated topics. Or they publish a lot of things on one unusually narrow topic.
You could also google a list of top scientific journals. If the journal is on a couple of those lists, they’re probably good. If they’re not, more research is needed.
Next, I’d look at their retractions. Good journals will always have a few but not too many. Garbage places will have none or a lot.
Then there’s the study authors. It takes a lot of time to do the research properly and write up the study for publication. Anyone with more than 2 or maybe 3 papers published in a year is a caution flag.
Lastly, when in doubt, assume the worst until proven otherwise.
–Peter
Edit:
Lastly, read the WSJ article that intercst gifted us in the post above this one. It explains it all much better than I did.
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There’s something called the Scientific Index that measures the weight of a researcher’s scholarship.
World Top 100 World Scientist and University Rankings 2024 - AD Scientific Index 2024?
I know that Robert Langer of MIT is legit and is well known in Chemical Engineering and drug development circles. Can’t speak to the other 99.
But like search engine optimization (SEO) in Google results,there are rings of scientific researchers that liberally cite each others papers to improve their ranking.
There are thousands of Particle Physicists with thousands and millions of cites. The list of author names on many papers look like a phone book. {{ LOL }}
intersct
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Well, there you have…that the media touts. Pretty much every article in the press on an allegedly novel research document is little more than a press release. Gussied up and fed to a credulous public by “health and science” journalists acting as stenographers…with the occasional sentence thrown in to distinguish the journalism of, say, the New York Times’ hack from the MailOnline’s. This has been going on for years…decades in fact and before the meteoric rise of predatory, “pay to publish” journals. Certainly, I have been alerting the folk link dumping such articles on the Health and Nutrition board since the early aughts (Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent research being the first example I remember citing…and before it was discovered to be fraudulent, too!) One of my points back then was that this rush to advertising preliminary data was fraught with all sorts of misleading information seeing as this data had not yet seen peer review. Fraudulent research being but one problem…honest mistakes and faulty hypotheses etc being an inevitability in novel research.
Thing is, every time this topic came up…and there was ample opportunity every week when someone would dump a link to the “latest finding” in rodent research published in an obscure journal …but it never seemed to dampen enthusiasm for more of the same. So, for all the pearl clutching in this particular thread, plenty of contributors have done just that…and I have no doubt will do so in the future for whatever reason. And will get just as shirty as the H&N folk when given the heads-up…“Science By Press Release”
I had an excellent article bookmarked that illustrated the problem and itemized a hierarchy of accountability contributing to the problem. Can’t find it now. It begins at the tippy top…researchers and research institutions themselves. For all the publish or perish attitudes around nowadays, there’s an obligation to behave…and sanctions should be applied when they don’t.
Not the article I was looking for, but Ben Goldacre…whose Bad Science columns in The Grauniad years ago alerted me to what was a serious problem…had a take also
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Example: the recent thread on this board about olive oil. The “study” apparently said “as part of a Mediterranean diet”, but what the local “news” showed, while touting the study, was someone pouring olive oil straight from the bottle into a spoon, with no mention of a Mediterranean diet, leaving the impression that you should drink a spoonful of olive oil each day.
And, presto: on my feed this morning, is a piece advocating drinking a spoon of olive oil each day.
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Writing from Port of Soller, Mallorca, where I am surrounded by
ancient fishing docks,
hillsides of ancient olive trees, threaded by
hiking trails, one of which I will walk uphill 5 kms to home
after finishing a multi platter, passed, leisurely midday meal (definitely NOT “lunch”) starring
sea foods,
small succulent pieces stewed lamb shoulder joint,
brown bread smeared with garlic and tomato,
tomato cucumber fennel-root salad
cheap red wine and lemon water
and eating “dessert” ofpickeled samphire (“sea fennel”)
local rich goat and sheep cheeses
bitter green and spicy black local olives
orange and lemon slices
various smoked, spicy, plain, salted almonds .
The locals tell me the the nutritionists are idiots, and that what matters most is not the olive oil but the pickled olives…
D fb
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Ah, but made from the same fruit…
DB2
Are the olives pickled with vinegar (ie no gut gut biome microbes), or fermented that supply gut biome microbes?
ralph
Have both. After all, they both are part of the “Mediterranean diet”, right?
Have both. After all, they both are part of the “Mediterranean diet”, right?
Changing diet does not work for USians, because it requires a change of routine and trying new things. USians want the easy panacea: take a pill, and not change anything else.
Steve
Incentivize the change and it works. Picking the correct incentive(s) is the hard part.
USians only seem to care about money. People have been warned, for decades, that being overweight will make them ill/dead, before their expected expiration date, but they are still stuffing down the groceries. One of the local TV stations does a periodic bit where their reporter visits a local restaurant (which I am pretty sure gains from the publicity) to listen to people complain. One of those pieces was on a few days ago. As the camera panned around the restaurant, I did not see anyone who my doc would say had anything resembling a healthy weight. They ranged from paunchy to obese.
As USians only seem to respond to money, how much are we prepared to pay people to keep their weight in a reasonable range, and exercise a bit?
Steve
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You may be in too much of a hurry. Consumption of olive oil in the US increased by 77% between 2002 and 2022. Adjusting for population growth, that’s a 50% growth in olive oil per capita.
DB2
The Soller green olives are fermented, small, not quite bitter, intense little flavor bombs. I, like most of the traditional Sollerics, eat them morning noon and night, probably 25 or so a day.
Their extra virgin olive oil is extremely good too.
The “sea fennel” is also fermented, and simply staggeringly good paired with a very little cheese or local jamon.
d fb
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Accompanied by a comparable reduction in other fats…including trans fat? Or in addition to everything else consumed per capita…and even more of that, too?
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Between 2002 and 2018 the average kcal supplied per person in the US went from 3783 to 3782.
Caloric supply by food group, 2002 ==> 2021
Plants 73% ==> 72%
Meat 12% ==> 13%
Dairy 10% ==> 10%
Eggs 1% ==> 1%
Animal fats 3% ==> 2%
Fish 1% ==> 1%
Animal protein consumption, 2002 ==> 2021
Fish 7% ==> 6%
Poultry 24% ==> 27%
Pork 11% ==> 13%
Beef 20% ==> 16%
Eggs 6% ==> 6%
Dairy 31% ==> 27%
Daily fat supply, 2002 ==> 2021
161g ==> 178g, +11%
Vegetable supply, kg/yr, 2002 ==> 2021
132 ==> 126, -5%
DB2
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What passes for a journal and what passes for a blogger has met in the middle. Now both are often crap.
You know most of what ends up in a journal is proven wrong later. We need to be careful not to believe things just because they are dressed up.
But of course…that’s the Scientific Method working as it should. Although, technically, not proven wrong, so much as studies are shown to be irreproducible (which strongly indicates that an initial hypothesis hasn’t been shown to be correct) There’s a big difference, since all hypotheses are contingent on current evidence, and are always open to revision should new data come along as technology advances, or new eyes provide for a different set of answers to questions the original hypothesis didn’t answer (or even managed to create). That’s the vibrancy of science…no room for the tomfoolery that the credulous fall for like the notion of “settled science” or Dr Oz or Mercola’s idea’s on what’s the flim flam of the day.
Regardless…although the end result is the same if you’ve stumbled across such a press release or advertorial served you by your favorite science communication outlet or WOO! Meister…this is very different from fraud. Deliberate misrepresentation of findings from the outset. The Scientific Method isn’t actually powered to detect fraud in the same way as it does a faulty hypothesis or sloppy methodology etc.
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As an artist, it would be nice to only be formally recognized. The problem though is how many eyeballs see my work.
Mercola was successful. The difference of not being in a journal versus a blog? If a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it?
The problem with the Journals during the pandemic was the ruthless push for everyone to get vaccinated. That was misinformation in a sense. By the time the vaccines were in place we were into the final leg of massive death rates. Delta was going to be replaced by Omicron. That natural selection internal to the virus is the norm with Pandemics.
We had screeds on this board about getting everyone vaccinated. My engineering friend would not get vaccinated. He has never had Covid till this day. He survived without getting vaccinated. No thanks to anyone else. We all screamed loudly. The powers that be held our hands and cried with us. It was not important. We found god in that moment anyway.
He reads Mercola and seven years earlier had introduced me to Mercola. I told him for years the good doctor was a snake oil salesman. We argued about that off and on.
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