![]() Globalization and hyper-interconnectivity will continue to produce disease epidemics that tax our ingenuity and responsivity to their limits. The irony is that we humans wish, and often have, to develop research findings into useful applications faster and faster. The standards in trails of pharmaceuticals or vaccines have, on the whole, improved since Thalidomide, but I would argue that the average quality of the scientific literature has not and that is largely a result of the phenomena discussed earlier. There are some features of research reporting on the present viral pandemic that bear inspection under the same light: we are, after all, talking about papers concerning insights into mechanisms of disease that are relevant to the development of therapeutics, cures or prophylactics, or even reports of such applications themselves. As its hidden terror passed from organic synthesis lab on to product formulation through trials to pharma reps then prescribing doctors and pregnant mothers, finally affecting the development of their fetuses, the magnification of its unpredicted effects produced damage that mere money can’t repair. Naturally, that would have taken more time and money. As pointed out by many, pre-clinical trials on pregnant animals would have revealed the teratogenic qualities of the pharmaceutical - a clear case of quality control. If, shortly after its guarantee period, a cheap washing machine fails in your household, it might ruin your clothes or flood your utility room: an annoying expense that you may well have to bear yourself as the second, and final, link in the chain.Ĭompare that with the misery created by Thalidomide, a drug that was arguably “under-tested” before being prescribed. The unpleasant reality is that the further down the chain it slips, the more unpredictable and potentially serious the impact becomes. Skip the quality control, and you basically push the financial impact further down the chain. It is not rare for true quality control in industry to account for 30% of the price of wares to the consumer. etc…Īs everyone who has worked in industry or experienced faulty products knows, quality control takes time, and by extension, money. I write “apparent” with a tinge of irony, because the truth is that the problem is far from obvious, even to some people who should be judging the performance of researchers on merit alone (rather than, say, numbers of “publications”): essentially, most of these gatekeepers are also so overloaded with the tasks of reviewing grant applications, fellowship applications, job applications, faculty positions, research papers, review papers etc. It’s simple: women already publish fewer papers than men on average, and because it seems to be largely male researchers who are the “carriers” of the infodemic sickness, so the disparity in apparent publication activity widens further. ![]() Not only does that “systemic disease” pose a risk to scientific credibility - because it contains an increasing amount of thinly-sliced research, repetitive reporting, plagiarized work, and downright fabricated papers - but it threatens to exacerbate the so-called “gender gap” in academia. And if it did, would it really be effective in signalling a problem? Unfortunately, I fear not, for the background “noise” is too high.Īs noted by Paola Villafuerte last month, the mere fact that more research publications than ever before are being produced creates a sickness of its own: an “infodemic” in Villafuerte’s words. However, no such symptomology occurs in this particular pathology. One would like to think that unsightly blotches appear on the surface of the infected victim, warning people to be wary of its content. In that piece, I proposed a model to explain how they manage to infect so many journals at a variety of publishers, making their way to the central nervous system that is editorial with most of them evading the immune system that is peer review. In a recent editorial in BioEssays, the epidemic of bogus papers originating from so-called “paper mills” was analyzed.
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