A mysterious company’s Covid-19 papers in top medical journals may be unraveling

Re:A mysterious company’s Covid-19 papers in top medical jou... by frenchyatwork on Wednesday June 03, 2020 @06:56PM (#23409959)

Peer reviewing is mostly orthogonal to journal publishing. Publishing in a journal generally requires a peer review, but there's no reason why you need a journal publication to get a peer review. Journals largely exist to manage prestige and career advancement in academia.

As for what science lay people can rely on? I'm not sure there's a simple answer to that question.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A mysterious company’s Covid-19 papers in top medical jou... by Natsu on Wednesday June 03, 2020 @08:38PM (#23410951)

I think you either have to find scientists you can trust (which presents a chicken & egg process) or study the field yourself.

That said, there are some good heuristics. Good scientists are able to show their reasoning process and explain why X is bad/good science. Bad ones handwave everything and push credentialism or rely on fallacious reasoning.

For example, I remember long ago when Ars Technica posted a detailed explanation of both what homeopathy is and how we know that it's completely bogus, why "water memory" doesn't and cannot exist, etc.

Meanwhile, in another failure of peer review, Nature published nonsense on "water memory" back in 1988:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_memory

[ Parent | on HN ]