ความคิดเห็นทั้งหมด : 3

Peer-review process falowed, says ex-editor


   เก็บมาฝากจาก The Guardian, นสพ. UK ครับ ยังไม่มีเวลาแปล แต่น่าสนใจมากทีเดียว

Richard Smith thinks that the way medical journals make their money, by publishing scientific papers, is immoral. He also says they are little more than a marketing tool of the drug companies. That is harsh talk from anybody-but even more remarkable from Smith, who was editor of the British Medical Journal (BMJ) for 25 years until his departure last summer.

Smith, like his outspoken former counterpart, Lancet eidtor Richard Horton, is unafraid of controversy. The two of them used to do a lively double act now and again, exposing the sharp practices of ambitious or desperate academics and single-mided drug companies bent on publication in prestigious peer-reviewed journals. But now, Smith"s thinking has moved on to question the very existence of medical journals in their present form.

....

Smith, too, wanted to write a book that would appeal to a general audience, even if it did not hit the bestseller cahrts. He started compiling a list of incidents where the publication of a paper in a medical journal had raised ethical questions, as with the alleged link of MMR - the measles mumps and rubella vaccination - to autism and the flawed study in 1990 which suggested that women who attended a particular cancer help centre were just as likely to die as those who did not (it did not acknowledge that they were more ill).

"It was as I began to think about these things hat this started to bother me," sayd Smith. "I had always known medical journalism was not about the truth and I tried to write that at least once a year. It is partly because of the nature of science - it is about provisional truths. Ypu observe a whole lot of phenomena and produce a hypothesis and try to destroy it and there is an assumption that you will eventually destroy it."

But another thought, he said, "was that this whole business of sending original research to doctors is kind of crazy. When you talk to ordinary doctors, they are not scientidists and yet here we are sending them this mass of complicated information that most of them are not equipped to critically appraise. They have not got the time."

ฟังดูน่าสนใจมากเพราะคนเขียนเป็นบรรณาธิการหนึ่งในวารสารการแพทย์ที่เก่าแก่และน่าเชื่อถือมากที่สุดของโลก (same league กับ Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of American Medical Association) และข้อเสนอหรือทางออกของคุณ Smith ยิ่ง radical กว่า ขอต่ออีกกระทู้ก็แล้วกัน จะได้ไม่ยาวเกิน




Posted by : Phoenix , Date : 2005-07-11 , Time : 18:57:29 , From IP : 203.156.119.145

ความคิดเห็นที่ : 1


   Title เขียนผิดครับ falowed ที่ถูกคือ "Flawed"



Posted by : Phoenix , Date : 2005-07-11 , Time : 18:58:48 , From IP : 203.156.119.145

ความคิดเห็นที่ : 2


   Continued...

There is the question of the validity of the research being published. The four best respected general medical journals in the world, they send out scientific papers for peer review by academics in the same field as the authors. This process gives the paper a sort of validation or stamp of authority in the medical world. But Smith, and other journal editors, have become very disenchanted with it.

"Peer review is a very flawed practice," he says. "It is slow and expensive, a lottery, and prone to abuse and bias. Much of the time it does not pick up errors."

Before the internet came along, scientific papers had to be published in journals. But now, he says, journals should give up what are effectively immoral earnings. They add no value to the scientific research, and yet it may take a year or more before they publish and they then charge people to read it. "Making money out of restricting access to research is immoral," he says.

Instead, he says, all the research should be published in one large free database, with access for all. Smith has joined the board of directors of the free access online Public Library of Science (PLoS).

....

"All this would mean is that instead of 30,000 journals or whateverm you might have 50-100 good ones," says Smith with equanimity.



Posted by : Phoenix , Date : 2005-07-11 , Time : 19:14:40 , From IP : 203.156.119.145

ความคิดเห็นที่ : 3


   [IMG]http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/sakon/phoenix_logo2_small.gif[/IMG]

Posted by : aaa , Date : 2005-09-13 , Time : 14:53:14 , From IP : 172.29.4.247

ความเห็นจาก Social Network : Facebook


สงวนสิทธิ์การแสดงความคิดเห็นสำหรับ สมาชิกเท่านั้น
>>>>> Page loaded: 0.002 seconds. <<<<<