Oct 30, 2020 11:47 PM
https://globalnews.ca/news/7433644/coron...st-report/
INTRO: Publishing weak, careless and sometimes fake research on the novel coronavirus is eroding trust in science, leading people to ignore public health advice, a new report from the Royal Society of Canada warns. The society’s COVID-19 task force report says scientists, public health officials, governments and journalists all must do better, and not allow the sense of urgency created by the pandemic to undermine long-held standards and ethics in their respected professions.
The Royal Society is an elite body of about 2,000 scholars and public intellectuals, meant to recognize and promote leading-edge research and the best thinking on important problems. “One of the fastest ways to create confusion and lose public trust is to publish and publicize weak, careless or, worse, fraudulent research,” the report says.
The report warns that the “panicky pandemic publishing” of research on COVID-19 is harmful when it takes shortcuts around the tried-and-true safeguards to ensure published science is both peer-reviewed and accurately portrayed. And it is happening more frequently in the pandemic, with one review finding circulation of COVID-19-related research before peer-review is complete _ known as pre-prints _ is happening 15 times more often than with non-pandemic related research... (MORE)
INTRO: Publishing weak, careless and sometimes fake research on the novel coronavirus is eroding trust in science, leading people to ignore public health advice, a new report from the Royal Society of Canada warns. The society’s COVID-19 task force report says scientists, public health officials, governments and journalists all must do better, and not allow the sense of urgency created by the pandemic to undermine long-held standards and ethics in their respected professions.
The Royal Society is an elite body of about 2,000 scholars and public intellectuals, meant to recognize and promote leading-edge research and the best thinking on important problems. “One of the fastest ways to create confusion and lose public trust is to publish and publicize weak, careless or, worse, fraudulent research,” the report says.
The report warns that the “panicky pandemic publishing” of research on COVID-19 is harmful when it takes shortcuts around the tried-and-true safeguards to ensure published science is both peer-reviewed and accurately portrayed. And it is happening more frequently in the pandemic, with one review finding circulation of COVID-19-related research before peer-review is complete _ known as pre-prints _ is happening 15 times more often than with non-pandemic related research... (MORE)