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

[rvallee]

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.

We have now reached a point where those doing systematic reviews must start by assuming that a study is fraudulent until they can have some evidence to the contrary. Some supporting evidence comes from the trial having been registered and having ethics committee approval.

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.

Retractions are the easiest to deal with, but they are, as Mol said, only a tiny fraction of untrustworthy or zombie studies. An editorial in the Cochrane Library accompanying the new guidelines recognises that there is no agreement on what constitutes an untrustworthy study, screening tools are not reliable, and “Misclassification could also lead to reputational damage to authors, legal consequences, and ethical issues associated with participants having taken part in research, only for it to be discounted.”

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.

Research fraud is often viewed as a problem of “bad apples,” but Barbara K Redman, who spoke at the webinar insists that it is not a problem of bad apples but bad barrels if not, she said, of rotten forests or orchards.

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.

The business model of journals and publishers depends on publishing, preferably lots of studies as cheaply as possible. They have little incentive to check for fraud and a positive disincentive to experience reputational damage—and possibly legal risk—from retracting studies.

May as well be describing this debacle of Cochrane's CBT and GET reviews.

Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.

Competing interest: RS was a cofounder of the Committee on Medical Ethics (COPE), for many years the chair of the Cochrane Library Oversight Committee, and a member of the board of the UK Research Integrity Office.

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.

 

[TiredSam]

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.

Horton said something similar, and yet his own track record shows he does not apply his own advice.

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?

 

[rvallee]

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?

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.

 

[Mithriel]

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.

 

[James Morris-Lent]

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.