Peer Reviewed Cancer; Peer Reviewed Medical; Peer Reviewed Orthopaedic; Prostate Cancer. The Peer Reviewed Medical Research Program (PRMRP). Peer-Reviewed Library; Medical Resource Links; Start a Med Group Now. Peer-Reviewed Articles. ScienceDirect is the world's leading source for scientific, technical, and medical research. Explore journals, books and articles. Peer Reviewed Cancer; Peer Reviewed Medical. 2011 Peer Reviewed Medical Research. Fink received a Fiscal Year 2008 Peer Reviewed Medical Research Program. 2011 Report on Research Progress and Future Directions 1. Publish- or- perish: Peer review and the corruption of science . It doesn't work very well any more, mainly as a result of the enormous number of papers that are being published (an estimated 1. There simply aren't enough competent people to do the job. The overwhelming effect of the huge (and unpaid) effort that is put into reviewing papers is to maintain a status hierarchy of journals. Any paper, however bad, can now get published in a journal that claims to be peer- reviewed. The blame for this sad situation lies with the people who have imposed a publish- or- perish culture, namely research funders and senior people in universities. University PR departments encourage exaggerated claims, and hard- pressed authors go along with them. Not long ago, Imperial College's medicine department were told that their . Hardly a day passes without a new journal starting. My email inbox is full of invitations to publish in a weird variety of journals. They'll take just about anything. The US National Library of Medicine indexes 3. They are all 'peer-reviewed'. Medical research Alternative medicine More.The peer review for a journal on homeopathy is, presumably, done largely by other believers in magic. If that were not the case, these journals would soon vanish. But it isn't only quack journals that have failures in peer review. In June, the British Journal of General Practice published a paper, . It has lots of numbers, but the result is very easy to see. All you have to do is look at their Figure. Image: BJGP. It's obvious at a glance that acupuncture has at best a tiny and erratic effect on any of the outcomes that were measured. The results are indeed quite interesting because they show that acupuncture doesn't even have a perceptible placebo effect. But this is not what the authors said. Their conclusion was: ? Well, perhaps they were people who are committed to acupuncture and it is common enough for advocates of alternative medicine to ignore evidence, even their own. But the real question is how conclusions like these came to be published in a respectable medical journal that is widely read by GPs. To make matters worse, the journal issued a press release that quotes its editor, Professor Roger Jones DM, FRCP, FRCGP, FMed. Sci. Charlotte Paterson's work considerably strengthens the evidence base for using acupuncture to help patients who are troubled by symptoms that we find difficult both to diagnose and to treat. The Daily Mail, for example, reported: . But there were howls of outrage in the blogosphere, and some choice comments on Twitter. In these days of the citizen journalist, mistakes are soon spotted. Two months later, the journal published 1. Those problems are so very obvious you'd imagine that the journal would apologise for a failure of the peer review process, and for a press release that misled the public. Anyone can make a mistake, but there was no public apology and no corrected press release.(Charlotte Paterson and Roger Jones respond to the author's criticisms below.)So what can be done about scientific publishing? The only service the publishers provide is to arrange for reviews and to print the journals. And for this they charge an exorbitant fee, a racket George Monbiot rightly calls . This sort of post- publication review would reduce costs enormously, and the results would be open for anyone to read without paying. It would also destroy the hegemony of half a dozen high- status journals. Everyone wants to publish in Nature, because it's seen as a passport to promotion and funding. The Nature Publishing Group has cashed in by starting dozens of other journals with Nature in the title. There is just one problem with self- publication and post- publication review. In 2. 00. 6 Nature magazine tried it and it wasn't popular. Most people who were asked didn't want to take part, and, more important, most people who were invited to comment declined to do so. The probable reason is the exceedingly competitive nature of research in many fields. A junior person might be terrified to criticise a senior person, and senior researchers might similarly be terrified of criticising each other, in case the person criticised was reviewing their next grant. Nevertheless, I suspect this sort of system has to come and there are things that could be done to ameliorate the problems. First, it would be essential to allow anonymous comments. Most reviewers are anonymous at present, so why not online? Second, the vast flood of papers that make the present system impossible should be stemmed. I'd suggest scientists should limit themselves to an average of two original papers a year. They should also be limited to holding one research grant at a time. Peer-Reviewed Grant Program. University of Michigan Medical School. Male Lupus Research 2009-2011. Facebook Twitter Email Print. The Independent Budget for VA Funding Recommends Continued Eligibility for Eye and Vision Research in. FY2009 DOD Peer Reviewed Medical. Peer reviewed Nursing Practice Innovation. Anyone who thought their work necessitated more than this would have to be scrutinised very carefully. It's well known that small research groups give better value than big ones, so that should be the rule. With far fewer papers being published, reviewers, grant committees and promotion committees might be able to read the papers, not just count them. A report of a parliamentary select committee on peer review concluded. While we have been assured by research funders that they do not use this as a proxy measure for the quality of research or of individual articles, representatives of research institutions have suggested that publication in a high- impact journal is still an important consideration when assessing individuals for career progression. My own university's promotion form still says . In Andrew Wakefield's case, the fraud linked autism with the MMR vaccine, causing the deaths of children from measles, and we owe a lot to Brian Deer, the journalist who exposed it. Deer has recently backed a proposal from the House of Commons Science and Technology select committee that an official regulator should be appointed to police science. I don't think this could work. Is the regulator going to repeat experiments, or even check original data, to make sure all is well? In all probability, a regulator would soon degenerate into yet another box- ticking quango, and end up, like the Quality Assurance Agency, doing more harm than good. The way to improve honesty is to remove official incentives to dishonesty. By and large, the problem does not arise from outright fraud, which is rare. It arises from official pressure to publish when you have nothing to say. David Colquhoun is professor of pharmacology at University College London. He blogs at DC's Improbable Science. Response on behalf of the CACTUS Study research team. Dr Charlotte Paterson, Peninsula College of Medicine & Dentistry, University of Exeter. Professor Colquhoun uses the freely available published paper of our CACTUS trial (Classical Acupuncture for Treating Unexplained Symptoms) as an example of . His contention, that . All you have to do is look at their figure. In table 3 of the paper we present all the data from the study with the results of the standard statistical tests. It is the results of these tests that determine whether the difference between the groups (those that did receive acupuncture in the first 2. In our case a statistically significant difference in favour of acupuncture was found for the primary outcome measure . Hence our conclusion that the addition of 1. The graphs in figure 2 (reproduced in Colquhoun's article) are provided for readers who prefer to see findings depicted in this way. They are, however, only useful when accompanied by the title of the figure: . With this information (omitted by Colquhoun), your readers can come to their own conclusions about what appeared to happen to each group during the second six months. This is of interest, but is not the basis for our statistical conclusions, and never would be for any trial. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of our study in the paper, including the fact that the average benefit was relatively small, but would refute Colquhoun's unsubstantiated suggestion that we . This is simply untrue. As for our response to peer review, this is a process that enabled us to improve the paper, and for our response to the debate in the journal letter pages, we refer you to the August issue of the British Journal of General Practice where it is published. Unfortunately, the voice of patients and the public have been largely absent from these debates, although the same issue of the journal includes our paper reporting the results of a study in which some of the trial participants were interviewed. This aspect of the study provided additional in- depth information about the patient experience and the findings support the trial results and provide potential explanations and new insights. For example, in addition to perceiving a range of positive effects, some participants appeared to take on a more active role in consultations and self- care. We found peer review to be helpful and we believe that the statistical findings of the randomised trial, together with the qualitative analysis of the patients' perspectives, provides doctors and patients with robust and useful information for making decisions about treatment. Roger Jones, editor of the British Journal of General Practice. David Colquhoun's critique of my journal's peer review and editorial processes is based on a single table lifted from the main research paper, in which the detailed numerical data tell a somewhat different story, rendering his analysis partial and his conclusions specious. Paterson and colleagues' paper was reviewed on two separate occasions by two expert statisticians, and read by me. The British Journal of General Practice operates an open peer review system, in which the identities of the authors and reviewers are known to each other. The paper was initially rejected, with re- submission offered if the authors could deal with numerous methodological and some presentational issues in their manuscript. The lack of . The re- submitted paper was judged to be much improved, although one reviewer still had concerns about the effect size of the intervention (acupuncture).
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