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Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?, 2021, Smith

Discussion in 'Research methodology news and research' started by rvallee, Jul 7, 2021.

  1. rvallee

    rvallee Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Interesting article but ironic given the author's role with COPE, which whitewashed PACE, and Cochrane, given the organization's failure to deal with exactly this. Problem is that the people who make those statements only ever apply them to things they don't like, I would bet a good sum that the author is fine with PACE and the horrible products released by Cochrane or the FINE trial-derived material they train NHS doctors with.

    Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?
    https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/07/0...esearch-is-fraudulent-until-proved-otherwise/


    Horton said something similar, and yet his own track record shows he does not apply his own advice. Here the author says about 20%. Horton said about half. And yet nothing is done, in fact it's almost impossible to make corrections to basic errors, or retract flawed papers or reviews.
    This guy is apparently a founding member of COPE, which dismissed this very issue with PACE as insignificant. And of course BMJ and their horrible handling with many of Crawley's papers. Oh well. Standards for thee, none for me.
    Misclassification errors, uh? And yet somehow it's been impossible to deal with this, this review is orphaned because although it's obviously misclassified, it can't be properly classified because none want it.
    People always forget the 2nd half, that a rotten apple spoils the whole bunch. It's the decision to protect the bad apples that guarantees spoiling the whole bunch.
    May as well be describing this debacle of Cochrane's CBT and GET reviews.

    3 organizations that failed too many times to count on this very problem. It's always other people who are the problem, and other people's research that is flawed or fraudulent.
     
  2. TiredSam

    TiredSam Committee Member

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    There seems to be a giant schoolboy-style competition amongst rather a lot of people, where they all sit in a row on both sides of a fence until the first one gets a splinter up their a***. I'm sure it's all a great joke and they're having a lot of laughs, but isn't it time the bell rang for the end of lunchbreak and they all had to go back inside to learn something?
     
  3. rvallee

    rvallee Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    It really does look like virtue signaling. They will mention it from time to time but have zero intention of doing anything about it. At best it may be a way to discredit research they don't like, otherwise it's just posturing. All talk, zero walk.
     
  4. Mithriel

    Mithriel Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Like they say, it is the cover up that causes the biggest problems. Everyone has now done something wrong so they can't admit they broke all the rules to let these dreadful ME papers be published.
     
    oldtimer, EzzieD, rvallee and 3 others like this.
  5. James Morris-Lent

    James Morris-Lent Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Just got around to looking at this one.

    One of takeaways is that high percentage of research from roughly 'non-Western' countries is effectively fraudulent.

    Fraud really seems like the easy part of the problem for the scientific literature although clearly it is not being policed well enough. Of course the much larger problem is bad non-fraudulent research which seems largely intractable.
     

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