Article: Doing your own research isn’t a bad thing, I tell my patients. But just how will they spot the fraudulent papers?

[Sly Saint]

While every self-aware doctor knows no one is an expert on everything, the average person turning to the internet cannot distinguish evidence from gloss.
With every year, the pace of fraudulent publishing rises. People who must live by “publish or perish”, whose promotion is tied to research output or whose funding is linked to citations are most likely to be swayed by these get-rich-quick schemes.

Ask most medical researchers about fraudulent research and they will insist that it is an isolated thing related to a few bad apples. For most, research and integrity go hand in hand.

But, as an extensive study by Northwestern University states, “large-scale, systematic fraud is happening on an industrial-sized level”. The researchers quote the rising prevalence of paper mills that mass-produce fake or manipulated research papers to academics; brokers who go between academics and publishers; and “predatory” journals whose main aim is to churn out papers regardless of their quality.

According to the researchers, if the doubling time of scientific papers is 15 years, that of fraudulent scientific papers is just one and a half years. They state that at least 400,000 (no, this is not a typo) papers published between 2000 and 2022 are suspect, the vast majority a product of fraud or plagiarism.

I’m an oncologist, so it is their next claim most alarms me. Labelling cancer as the most vulnerable field for fraudulent research, they state: “A huge fraction of the cancer literature is completely unreliable.”

Obviously, even an attentive gatekeeper can be fooled – the world’s foremost journals have been forced to retract publications. But when the people perpetuating fake science are the same people publishing the fake science, what was once a side issue is now a real problem.

Doing your own research isn’t a bad thing, I tell my patients. But just how will they spot the fraudulent papers? | Ranjana Srivastava

While every self-aware doctor knows no one is an expert on everything, the average person turning to the internet cannot distinguish evidence from gloss

www.theguardian.com

 

[Utsikt]

A lot would be solved if the medical profession actually adhered to basic standards themselves. Patients are struggling to see the difference between quackery and science because so much quackery is endorsed by the system and practitioners, so there is nothing to compare it to.

 

[BrightCandle]

The lancet still has the PACE trial published, it has not been retracted and its still being referenced. The accusation that the patients don't have the skills to assess paper quality, yet they were the ones that criticised the papers clear fraud, shows that the healthcare industry clearly doesn't understand who it is that can't spot the bad papers.