Nov 13, 2023 03:50 AM
(This post was last modified: Nov 13, 2023 03:51 AM by C C.)
What’s wrong with peer review?
https://www.wsj.com/science/whats-wrong-..._permalink
EXCERPTS: The latest in a series of high-profile retractions of research papers has people asking: What’s wrong with peer review? [...] The number of retractions has been rising for years.
[...] “Every serious scientist I know who looked at this paper thought it shouldn’t have been published from the very beginning. ... I think what it says is that if we can’t trust the journals, we do need to think about alternative systems.”
[...] Typically, reviewers are working scientists tapped by journal editors to critique submissions and recommend whether they should appear in print. Their reviews are almost always provided for free as a service to the scientific community. And to facilitate candid assessments, their identities are usually concealed.
[...] journal editors acknowledge that errors or fraud can escape notice because reviewers don’t audit underlying data sets. That’s not their job ... “I would not want to think of my peer reviewers on the papers as some kind of police squad catching mistakes”...
[...] While only a small fraction of the millions of studies published every year are retracted, when questionable research does make it into the pages of a prestigious journal, the consequences can be severe and long-lasting.... (MORE - missing details)
No, traditional Chinese medicine has not been vindicated by science
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/medica...ed-science
INTRO: People love to show that skeptics were wrong about something, especially when national pride hangs in the balance. The South China Morning Post published the following headline on November 3rd: “Scientists find traditional Chinese medicine is based on a complex network of proteins – 3,000 years before modern science.”
The article points out that respectable editorials in the scientific literature had repeatedly referred to traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) as “largely just pseudoscience” and “based on unsubstantiated theories.” Yet here was the believer’s vindication: that TCM really was rigorously scientific while predating the European origin of what we refer to as “modern science.”
Skeptics were bound to eat their hats.
The study itself, published in Science Advances, is certainly interesting, but its complexity makes it opaque to the average person. It’s one of those impenetrable bits of data wrangling that can easily be dismissed as nonsense by the TCM skeptic or blindly embraced as confirmatory by the TCM believer.
Let’s dive in... (MORE - details)
https://www.wsj.com/science/whats-wrong-..._permalink
EXCERPTS: The latest in a series of high-profile retractions of research papers has people asking: What’s wrong with peer review? [...] The number of retractions has been rising for years.
[...] “Every serious scientist I know who looked at this paper thought it shouldn’t have been published from the very beginning. ... I think what it says is that if we can’t trust the journals, we do need to think about alternative systems.”
[...] Typically, reviewers are working scientists tapped by journal editors to critique submissions and recommend whether they should appear in print. Their reviews are almost always provided for free as a service to the scientific community. And to facilitate candid assessments, their identities are usually concealed.
[...] journal editors acknowledge that errors or fraud can escape notice because reviewers don’t audit underlying data sets. That’s not their job ... “I would not want to think of my peer reviewers on the papers as some kind of police squad catching mistakes”...
[...] While only a small fraction of the millions of studies published every year are retracted, when questionable research does make it into the pages of a prestigious journal, the consequences can be severe and long-lasting.... (MORE - missing details)
No, traditional Chinese medicine has not been vindicated by science
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/medica...ed-science
INTRO: People love to show that skeptics were wrong about something, especially when national pride hangs in the balance. The South China Morning Post published the following headline on November 3rd: “Scientists find traditional Chinese medicine is based on a complex network of proteins – 3,000 years before modern science.”
The article points out that respectable editorials in the scientific literature had repeatedly referred to traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) as “largely just pseudoscience” and “based on unsubstantiated theories.” Yet here was the believer’s vindication: that TCM really was rigorously scientific while predating the European origin of what we refer to as “modern science.”
Skeptics were bound to eat their hats.
The study itself, published in Science Advances, is certainly interesting, but its complexity makes it opaque to the average person. It’s one of those impenetrable bits of data wrangling that can easily be dismissed as nonsense by the TCM skeptic or blindly embraced as confirmatory by the TCM believer.
Let’s dive in... (MORE - details)
More like a feather in the cap. Another example of skeptics being the impetus for better evaluation and perhaps proof in some instances. Is there something wrong with that? Seems people don’t like the applecart being upset and are quite willing to accept pseudo, myth, tales, old customs etc as factual.