Quote:
Originally Posted by echinosum
But 2000 articles is a drop in the ocean in comparison with all medical articles. Expecting 100% of humanity to be honest/competent is unrealistic, and that is true of published scientific researchers too. Much worse than the problem you mention is meddling by drugs companies to suppress unhelpful results. On the other hand, nearly all of CAM articles are of poor quality. Whereas, despite the problems of fraud and conflicts of interest, mainstream medicine has been responsible for great reductions in disease mortality.
However I would agree that research of the form "X foodstuff is good for you" tends to be pretty rubbish.
Climate science does indeed attract a lot of pseudo-scientists, but they tend to have difficulty getting published in peer-reviewed journals.
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Unfortunately peer review is no longer a guarantee of quality.
A 'peer reviewed' paper last year had the following passage in it: "When plotted the empirical data seemed unlikely, so the data was modified to match the output of the model." (Hansen et al)
The most common response from 'Natures' reviewers was, ‘It has to be wrong. I don’t know why it is wrong, but it has to be wrong.’ Which means ground breaking research frequently never gets published.
There's a good article in the Guardian out peer review shortcomings he
Publish-or-perish: Peer review and the corruption of science | David Colquhoun | Science | guardian.co.uk
extract
"Peer review is the process that decides whether your work gets published in an academic journal. It doesn't work very well any more, mainly as a result of the enormous number of papers that are being published (an estimated 1.3 million papers in 23,750 journals in 2006). 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."
Peer review is in a mess mainly due to the internet, the gate guardians who tried to make sure that nothing too radical rocked the boat are being seen to be wrong minded. A good example of that is Henrik Svensmark's theory on the effects of cosmic rays on cloud formation as an indirect cause of global warming, his paper was trashed by the climate change gate guardians as rubbish................... then of course a couple of years later CERN proves the theory to be valid, they had to accept it, or show it to be wrong.
If anyone has any doubts about peer review, read the climate gate E-Mails.