“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