News in a nutshell
| 21 June, 2010 | Adie Chan |
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Useless science denounced
Five professors from Emory University, Virginia Commonwealth University, and the University of California at Los Angeles railed against low-quality research last week in The Chronicle of Higher Education, arguing that an astounding growth in journals and quantity of publications, especially the increase in low-cited papers, has a “profoundly damaging effect” on science as a whole. Low-cited works not only require years of funding and research, but overburden leading scientists with peer review, pressure younger scholars to produce, and create a swamp of articles that researchers waste their time reading. “More isn’t better,” the authors argue.
Stem cell perils
A patient who received an experimental stem cell therapy at a private clinic subsequently suffered tissue damage and died from an infection, the BBC reports. The patient’s kidney failure did not improve after treatment with her own hematopoietic stem cells, and she developed lesions of blood vessels and bone marrow cells at the injection site, reported Canadian and Thai researchers in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.
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Those who know and can do are under the control of those who don’t and can’t.
Since when is “low cited papers” a proper metric for “useless research?” Funding controls and approvals need to control this BEFORE the authors reach a point of publishing dreck. Apparently editorial reviewers don’t seem to think this is a problem in filling up some of the second and third tier publications.
Fake drugs flourish – There is one primary reason for this occurring. That is the middlemen between manufacturers and the pharmacy system. There is an excellent book analyzing this (whose title escapes me right now) that shows that for the wholesalers to make a profit, they must buy counterfeit drugs and sell them into the pharmaceutical retail system. It is otherwise impossible for them to make a profit.
These wholesalers area relatively recent invention, (in the last 10-15 years) and prior to their appearance manufacturers sent product direct. There is absolutely no justification for wholesalers to exist. The original justification was that they would cut costs to consumers. However, it is provable that it is impossible to sell pharmaceuticals into retail for a lower price than the manufacturers can offer.
At this point, these wholesalers (after being indicted multiple times) give large donations to politicians and to major universities. Those donations have silenced critics.
But that is the root problem. Until the laws are repealed that force the wholesaler system on the public, the problem will continue to get worse.
would a co operative system for the manufacturers be an answer? It became neccessary in other fields in order to protect quality.
Regarding the five professors who point out problems associated with ‘less important’ publications, I would say the following:
1. For many years, a number of academicians have been citing themselves in chains of related publications, many on the same subject. The push to publish has already done in the scholarly monograph.
2. On the other hand, who is to say what is important? Although we sometimes agree on the really good work (like Bell’s theorum), most papers are published because they fit someone’s current trend of thought, not because they are innovative in some special way. For example, Science published one anecdote about a fly that resembled a certain kind of spider. Important? At the same time they turned down a more careful, experimental paper that demonstrated the temporal degradation or decay of memory in a terrestrial arthropod. Less important? No, but the latter paper did not come with a catchy title.
For 50 years, scientists thought Gregor Mendel’s publication was low quality…..