“Open access jour­nal PLoS Med­i­cine has pub­lished a paper in its lat­est issue, accord­ing to which the cur­rent sys­tem of pub­lish­ing med­ical and sci­en­tific research pro­vides a dis­torted view of the real­ity of sci­en­tific data that are gen­er­ated in the lab­o­ra­tory and clinic. In their paper, a team of researchers — Neal Young of the National Insti­tutes of Health; John Ioan­ni­dis of Tufts Uni­ver­sity School of Med­i­cine, USA and Uni­ver­sity of Ioan­nina School of Med­i­cine, Greece; and Omar Al-Ubaydli of George Mason Uni­ver­sity — apply prin­ci­ples from the field of eco­nom­ics to present evi­dence con­sis­tent with a distortion.

Accord­ing to these researchers, there is an extreme imbal­ance between the abun­dance of sup­ply and the increas­ingly lim­ited venues for pub­li­ca­tion. The result is that only a small pro­por­tion of all research results are even­tu­ally cho­sen for pub­li­ca­tion, and these results are unrep­re­sen­ta­tive of sci­en­tists’ repeated sam­plings of the real world. The authors argue that there is a moral imper­a­tive to recon­sider how sci­en­tific data are judged and dis­sem­i­nated. The paper is avail­able online at http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0050201.

PLoS Med­i­cine is a peer-reviewed, inter­na­tional, open-access jour­nal pub­lished by the Pub­lic Library of Sci­ence (PLoS), a non­profit organ­i­sa­tion. The jour­nal pro­vides an open-access venue for pub­lish­ing impor­tant orig­i­nal research and analy­sis rel­e­vant to human health.”

Source:  Knowl­edge­s­peak Newsletter