Author-paid publication fees corrupt science and should be abandoned

Re:Author-paid publication fees corrupt science and should b... by kstrauser on Saturday August 24, 2024 @11:32AM (#41338986)

I was told long ago that the first rule of evaluating a medical treatment is to ignore all the clinical studies because nothing useful comes out of them.

I don’t know if that’s actually the case but that seems to be the prevailing thought. Which is awful, because it should be the opposite. Clinical studies should be the gold standard. They’re often conducted by people who are better doctors than scientists though. A zero-blind trial of n=4 might perhaps not be the definitive study the doctor had hoped.

(Not to pick on doctors. My wife’s one. Software developers often fall into the same common “I’m good at this one hard in-demand skill so I must be good at all of them” trap.)

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Re:Author-paid publication fees corrupt science and should b... by p00dles on Sunday August 25, 2024 @05:30AM (#41345882)

To ignore _all_ clinical studies because “nothing useful comes out of them” seems extreme. Yes, there are poorly run studies, and conclusions can be inappropriately drawn from studies (ex: when a study wasn’t meant to answer certain questions).

However, well-run randomized control trials (RCTs) in medicine absolutely exist and can be a very strong form of evidence when interpreted correctly. This is especially true in comparison to other disciplines (economics, etc.) where such RCT trials are impossible and researchers wish that they a research tool as valuable as an RCT.

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Re:Author-paid publication fees corrupt science and should b... by kstrauser on Sunday August 25, 2024 @11:19AM (#41347901)

Fair. It was mainly in the context of “clinical studies show that unlikely thing X cures Y”. No randomized double-blind trials? Sure.

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