Evaluation of spin in abstracts of papers in psychiatry and psychology journals, 2019, Jellison et al

Open access at https://ebm.bmj.com/content/early/2019/07/04/bmjebm-2019-111176#T2

 

How can they "continue" to be vigilant if they aren't already?

 

Standards are meaningless if they are not enforced. They clearly are not. On top of massive interpretation and allowing BS explanations to deviations from protocol, or "assurances" from researchers that those deviations did not impact outcome (then why deviate?) even when reanalysis shows it actually turned failure into "success" that is widely overhyped and misrepresented by the authors themselves.

Until research like PACE, which ignored all standards and just did WTF they wanted to do to achieve their results, then any discussion beyond basic adherence to standards is meaningless. It's not just a problem of interpretation, not even close.

And what about non-controlled trials? Another standard that can be arbitrarily waived off without any consequences. PACE is resoundly promoted as gold standard despite not being controlled.

Clean your house first, psychs. It's as dirty as the worst of hoarders out there.

 

I'm sure there is more to say on the subject of publishers and I don't know just how many there are but of two of the largest science publishers AAAS and Nature only one publishes a journal of psychiatry. Nature, based in the UK publishes Molecular Psychiatry. As far as I can tell the American (AAAS) does not.

This is a really minor but possibly interesting point.

I'm sure there is much more and other things to say about science papers and journals. What a morass this has become. I hope some viable solutions are found soon.

 

The upcoming open research initiative should be a good step in that direction. I'm not entirely convinced PACE would have been published if they would have been forced to make the full raw data available for scrutiny. They clearly bet on being able to keep it secret long enough to have it take hold in people's imagination that even if forced to release some data the lies would already be too firmly entrenched. Good bet, paid off well for their careers. Not so much for the millions of lives destroyed but that's a sacrifice they were willing to make.

Same with trial pre-registration. The lies worked well because they did not report any of the massive deviations in the papers themselves.

I definitely predict a steep drop-off in the kind of garbage-quality churn that Crawley and Chalder are putting out these days. Maybe that even explains why there is so much of it lately, a kind of goodbye salvo before it becomes too embarrassing to publish.

 

Re amount of churned out papers this year
If only it represented a last gasp. I suspect
There's so much probably as it's been timed for NICE deliberation.

Having recently attended a SEN evening, psychological education seems to be the area to focus.

Whilst there were some positive aspects re understanding and advocating within the system ( largely for autism and dyslexia) , actual understanding and suggested support therapy was truly dire, as was ethics awareness.

 

Someone at the SMC has a very morbid sense of humor. And Sharpe is either completely clueless or enjoys hurting people and is happy to gloat about it. Regardless, anyone who thought this was a good idea needs to take a long hard look in the mirror.

 

well yes, he is an expert on the subject of spin and dodgy abstracts in research papers, so for once the SMC actually chose an appropriate subject for him to comment on.