Introducing a three-part series on medical journal ghostwriting

Gary Schwitzer, at HealthNewsReview.org, presents a three part series on medical journal ghostwriting.

Good overview on how to spot ghostwriting and two examples of how ghostwriting may introduce conflicts of interest and skewed results.

 

[Reblog] Curēus, an open-access medical journal with crowdsourcing

[Reblog] Curēus, an open-access medical journal with crowdsourcing December 23, 2012

Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Medicine, Web 2.0, Medical journalism,Medicine 2.0, e-Science.
trackbackJohn Adler who is a neurosurgeon at Stanford just launched Curēus, an open-source medical journal that leverages crowdsourcing to make scientific research more readily available to the general public. What do you think?

Based in Palo Alto, California, Curēus is the medical journal for a new generation of both doctors AND patients. Leveraging the power of an online, crowd-sourced community platform, Curēus promotes medical research by offering tools that better serve and highlight the people who create it, resulting in better research, faster publication and easier access for everyone.

We make it easier and faster to publish your work – it’s always free and you retain the copyright. What’s more, the Curēus platform is designed to provide a place for physicians to build their digital CV anchored with their posters and papers.

The Curēus site also has..

• Posters
• A supportive care collection
• Google map for who is posting (couldn’t get the map to “work” for me..)
• “Instructions for Authors”

Currently, a relatively few number of papers online. The concept is good, here’s hoping this is not a flash in the pan, but the wave of the future.

Related articles

• Curēus Continues a Trend of Crowdsourcing Medical Journals (medgadget.com)
• Curēus, an open-access medical journal with crowdsourcing (scienceroll.com)
• Curēus, New Open-Source Medical Journal Created by Stanford Neurosurgeon John Adler,Scientific Research More Readily Available, Peer To Peer Reviews (ducknetweb.blogspot.com)
• A new open-source medical journal has been launched (skeptical-science.com)
• Crowdsourcing Medical Journals (fastcompany.com)
• Medical Journal Gets Social With Crowdsourcing Platform (iphonesavior.com)

It is possible to both have and not have Alzheimer’s disease

English: PET scan of a human brain with Alzheimer’s disease (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

Along the lines of what I’ve been thinking for a few years..symptoms and tests can “point”, but not always
indicate with 100% accuracy. Signs of disease are not always “proof” of disease.

 

 

 

From the 24 November 2012 article at KevinMD.com

 

It is possible to both have and not have Alzheimer’s disease. Contradictory as this statement is, a study reported from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) supports it.

In a paper published in the October issue of the Annals of Neurology investigators reported the results of biomarker studies of 53 patients with dementia caused by Alzheimer’s disease. They found a notable proportion of these patients lacked one of the signature pathologies: brain amyloid. This result has notable scientific and policy implications…..

 

Related articles

 

• Alzheimer’s Diagnosis: More Tests Improve Chance Of Early Detection (huffingtonpost.com)
• Researchers discover gender-based differences in Alzheimer’s disease (eurekalert.org)
• Tests could lead to Alzheimer’s Disease breakthrough (wtvr.com)
• Better understanding of the cause of Alzheimer’s disease: New suggestion for a possible treatment (medicalxpress.com)

 

Medical Cases in literature : an open database

Reblog from the 12 December 2012 posting at  Science Intelligence and InfoPros

Open access (OA) publisher BioMed Central has launched a new semantically-enriched search tool, Cases Database, which aims to enhance the discovery, filtering and aggregation of medical case reports from many journals. OA to journal articles published under Creative Commons licences, which permit text mining, enable the literature to be reused as a resource for scientific discovery

More than 11,000 cases from 100 different journals are reportedly available to be freely searched with Cases Database.

Cases Database uses text mining and medical term recognition to filter peer reviewed medical case reports and provide a semantically enriched search experience. The database offers structured search and filtering by condition, symptom, intervention, pathogen, patient demographic and many other data fields, allowing fast identification of relevant case reports to support clinical practice and research. Registered users can save cases, set up e-mail alerts tonew cases matching their search terms, and export their results. Cases Database will be free to access and is expected to be of particular interest to practicing clinicians, researchers, lecturers, drug regulators, patients, students and authors.

Announcement:

http://blogs.biomedcentral.com/bmcblog/2012/12/10/embrace-information-overload-with-cases-database/

 

http://www.casesdatabase.com/

Related articles

• Medical Cases in literature : an open database (scienceintelligence.wordpress.com)
• BioMed Central Now Publishing Manuscripts in ePUB Format & Launches Cases Database (infodocket.com)
• Text Mining from Three Perspectives – Publisher (slideshare.net)
• A Centralized Portal to Free Biomedical Literature: Europe PubMed Central (intellogist.wordpress.com)
• Crowdsourcing a database of “predatory OA journals” (svpow.com)
• New Players, New Priorities – Part 3: It’s Never About the Money; It’s Always About the Money (scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org)
• As Hybrid Open Access Grows, The Scholarly Community Needs Article-level OA Metadata (scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org)

 

New Image Search Engine from the National Library of Medicine For Biomedical Articles

From the Web announcement

The Open-i project aims to provide next generation information retrieval services for biomedical articles from the full text collections such as PubMed Central. It is unique in its ability to index both the text and images in the articles. The article retrieval is powered by Essie (the search engine that supports ClinicalTrials.gov). Open-i lets users retrieve not only the MEDLINE citation information, but also the outcome statements in the article and the most relevant figure from it. Further, it is possible to use the figure as a query component to find other relevant images or other visually similar images. Future stages aim to provide image region-of-interest (ROI) based querying. The initial number of images is projected to be around 600,000 and will scale to millions. The extensive image analysis and indexing and deep text analysis and indexing require distributed computing. At the request of the Board of Scientific Counselors, we intend to make the image computation services available as a NLM service. Vist our Frequently Asked Questions page for more information and help.

Related articles

• Open Access Biomedical Image Search Engine (beta) (bespacific.com)
• A Centralized Portal to Free Biomedical Literature: Europe PubMed Central (intellogist.wordpress.com)
• How to Stay Updated on Yearly Changes to MEDLINE (intellogist.wordpress.com)
• New PubMed Tricks (hslnews.wordpress.com)
• Europe PubMed Central: not only a new Medline (scienceintelligence.wordpress.com)
• PubMed Central or OA Central – More Strange Behaviors at PMC and NLM Paint a Portrait of Biases and Poor Process (scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org)
• Introducing PubReader: A New Way to Read PubMed Central Articles, Code Also Available (infodocket.com)

 

Scientists, Foundations, Libraries, Universities, and Advocates Unite and Issue New Recommendations to Make Research Freely Available to All Online

 

Those of you who follow my blog know this is one of my passions!

From the press release

September 12, 2012   Information Program

Scientists, Foundations, Libraries, Universities, and Advocates Unite and Issue New Recommendations to Make Research Freely Available to All Online

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: September 12, 2012

CONTACT: Andrea Higginbotham, SPARC, andrea@arl.org; 202-296-2296

Amy Weil, Open Society Foundations, aweil@sorosny.org; 212-548-0381

WASHINGTON—In response to the growing demand to make research free and available to anyone with a computer and an internet connection, a diverse coalition today issued new recommendations that could usher in huge advances in the sciences, medicine, and health.

The recommendations were developed by leaders of the Open Access movement, which has worked for the past decade to provide the public with unrestricted, free access to scholarly research—much of which is publicly funded. Making the research publicly available to everyone—free of charge and without most copyright and licensing restrictions—will accelerate scientific research efforts and allow authors to reach a larger number of readers…

Related articles

• Ten Years After Budapest Open Access Initiative New Recommendations Released (infodocket.com)
• Whither Science Publishing? (the-scientist.com)
• Open access for development: a battle not yet won (scidev.net)
• UK government to make all publicly-funded scientific research freely available (rawstory.com)
• UK reseach to be freely available (bbc.co.uk)
• New open access recommendations ten years on from Budapest Open Access Initiative (okfn.org)
• Academic journals face a radical shake-up (economist.com)
• You: Free access to British scientific research to be available within two years (guardian.co.uk)

 

Are Medical Conferences Useful? And for Whom?

Credit: Wikipedia Commons

A medical doctor (who himself is a big draw at medical conferences) has recently questioned the motives and utility of medical conferences. [Mythbuster Ioannidis: Are Medical Conferences Really Useful?]

He believes much of the presented research findings  are not fully peer-reviewed, and thus cannot  fully educate, train, or contribute to evidence-based practice. Often findings at medical conferences are seized upon by the popular press and prematurely promoted as having sound scientific evidence. Quite often these findings change with peer review and are later published with the revisions and modified findings in scientific journals.

Excerpt from the 4 April 2012 JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) article
(The full text of this article is by subscription only, these excerpts came from a related posting at HealthNewsReview.org)

An estimate of more than 100 000 medical meetings per year may not be unrealistic, when local meetings are also counted. The cumulative cost of these events worldwide is not possible to fathom.

Do medical conferences serve any purpose? In theory, these meetings aim to disseminate and advance research, train, educate, and set evidence-based policy. Although these are worthy goals, there is virtually no evidence supporting the utility of most conferences. Conversely, some accumulating evidence suggests that medical congresses may serve a specific system of questionable values that may be harmful to medicine and health care.

…

The availability of a plethora of conferences promotes a mode of scientific citizenship in which a bulk production of abstracts, with no or superficial peer review, leads to mediocre curriculum vita building. Even though most research conferences have adopted peer-review processes, the ability to judge an abstract of 150 to 400 words is limited and the process is more of sentimental value.

…

Moreover, many abstracts reported at the medical meetings are never published as full-text articles even though abstract presentations can nevertheless communicate to wide audiences premature and sometimes inaccurate results. It has long been documented that several findings change when research reports undergo more extensive peer review and are published as completed articles.* Late-breaker sessions in particular have become extremely attractive prominent venues within medical conferences because seemingly they represent the most notable latest research news. However, it is unclear why these data cannot be released immediately when they are ready and it is unclear why attending a meeting far from home is necessary to hear them. A virtual online late-breaker portal could be established for the timely dissemination of important findings….

…Power and influence appear plentiful in many of these meetings. Not surprisingly, the drug, device, biotechnology, and health care–related industries make full use of such opportunities to engage thousands of practicing physicians. Lush exhibitions and infiltration of the scientific program through satellite meetings or even core sessions are common avenues of engagement. Although many meetings require all speakers to disclose all potential conflicts, the majority of speakers often have numerous conflicts, as is also demonstrated in empirical evaluations of similar groups of experts named on authorship lists of influential professional society guidelines.”

Ioannidis doesn’t discard the entire notion of conferences.  In fact, he projects what “repurposed” conferences might be like:

“Repurposed conferences could be designed to be entirely committed to academic detailing (ed. note: drug company “educational” outreach to physicians). All their exhibitions and satellite symposia would deal with how to prescribe specific interventions appropriately and how to favor interventions that are inexpensive, well tested, and safe. Such repurposed conferences could also focus on how to use fewer tests and fewer interventions or even no tests and no interventions, when they are not clearly needed.”

 

Related Resources

• Tips on Locating Conference Proceedings
  Includes advice on searching the Internet, databases, and contacting librarians and conference presentation authors
• Posters from Life Sciences and Medicine Conferences and Meetings
  Not comprehensive, but worth checking

 

Related articles

• The Missing Outcry – Are the NIH and Its Researchers Shirking Their Obligations? (scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org)
• Lessons for journalists and the public about all the news we hear from medical conferences (HealthNewsReview.org)
• Mythbuster Ioannidis: Are Medical Conferences Really Useful? (Common Health-Reform and Reality)

Open science: change is coming to how scientists communicate research findings

Image via WikipediaAuthor - art designer at PLoS, I converted a pdf into svg http://www.plos.org/

How Scientists Communicate Affects How Research Results Are Applied …as FDA approved drugs, nutrition values, violence prevention, and climate change models

Past blog postings (see below) here have often touched on the difficulties of  obtaining recent scientific and medical findings in original biomedical articles.  Most of these research articles are only found in journals that charge high annual subscription rates ($600.00/ year and up) or an access fee of about $20.00 per article.

Not only is this pricing arrangement making it difficult for scientists to get needed information, but it is becoming nearly impossible for even university and research libraries to buy subscription to the journals their customers want. Additionally article authors must pay publication fees to the journals which range from $1,000  to $5,000 per article.

Most stakeholders (researchers, librarians, publishing companies) believe that the relatively high costs of publishing articles is a major flaw of the current publishing system. These publishing costs used to be born by the researcher in centuries past and were relatively cheap and involved much fewer scientists in tight knit groups. But with the sheer numbers of those wanting information, the many biomedical specialities, and the sophistication of article content (images, videos, and audios), the cost per article has dramatically risen.

Some related statistics (from the posting How many science journals at Science Intelligence and InfoPros)

• Estimation: <> 25-40,000 journals
• 96% are published online
• 8-10% are published under Open Access models
• 20% of science articles are available free of charge
• How many articles have been published ever (means since 1665)? est. 50 millions
• Growth: 1.4 million of articles per year
• There are 2,000 publishers but Top 3 (Elsevier, Springer, Wiley)  account for 42% of articles published

The open science model is one initiative which may reduce costs and increase readership. This approach may well also drastically reduce the time from article completion by the scientist to article publication. It is currently not uncommon for an article in a peer reviewed journal to take up to  1 1/2 years to be published after submission.

In a recent New York Times article (Cracking Open the Scientific Process), the conservative culture of science is outlined, as well as the plausibility of using social media as vehicles of communicating research results. The article also summarizes another fear of scientists. While social media is a less costly and speedier way to communicate research approaches and results, it currently lacks the quality control and trustability of the peer review process in selecting and editing articles for publication.

While Open Science overwhelmingly is geared for  scientist participation only, the way scientists communicate does ultimately affect the application of research. Examples in consumer health  include the drugs we take, the way treatments are prescribed, and the make up of a well balanced diet.  Current questions about the Open Science model include how wise is the scientific equivalent of crowdsourcing? and who will pay for the costs involved and how much?

Some excerpts from the article

The system is hidebound, expensive and elitist, they say. Peer review can take months, journal subscriptions can be prohibitively costly, and a handful of gatekeepers limit the flow of information. It is an ideal system for sharing knowledge, said the quantum physicist Michael Nielsen, only “if you’re stuck with 17th-century technology.”

Dr. Nielsen and other advocates for “open science” say science can accomplish much more, much faster, in an environment of friction-free collaboration over the Internet. And despite a host of obstacles, including the skepticism of many established scientists, their ideas are gaining traction.

Open-access archives and journals like arXiv and thePublic Library of Science (PLoS) have sprung up in recent years. GalaxyZoo, a citizen-science site, has classified millions of objects in space, discovering characteristics that have led to a raft of scientific papers….

…a social networking site called ResearchGate — where scientists can answer one another’s questions, share papers and find collaborators — is rapidly gaining popularity…

  …On Thursday [January 19] , 450 bloggers, journalists, students, scientists, librarians and programmers will converge on North Carolina State University (and thousands more will join in online) for the sixth annual ScienceOnline conference. Science is moving to a collaborative model, said Bora Zivkovic, a chronobiology blogger who is a founder of the conference, “because it works better in the current ecosystem, in the Web-connected world.”…

…[The Research Gate] Web site is a sort of mash-up of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, with profile pages, comments, groups, job listings, and “like” and “follow” buttons (but without baby photos, cat videos and thinly veiled self-praise). Only scientists are invited to pose and answer questions — a rule that should not be hard to enforce, with discussion threads about topics like polymerase chain reactions that only a scientist could love….

Related past postings at Health and Medical News…

• The White House Calls for Information on Public Access to Publications and Data  (via The Scholarly Kitchen)
• Many NIH-funded clinical trials go unpublished over two years after completion (with ClinicalTrials.gov link for many trial study results)
•  Impact of free access to the scientific literature, including empowerment of health care consumers

Related articles (basically an indicator of how hot this topic is)

• ‘Open Science’ Challenges Journal Tradition With Web Collaboration – Thomas Lin via NYTimes.com (stoweboyd.com)
• Advocates For Open Science Say Systemic Change Is Inevitable (keptup.typepad.com)
• Cracking Open the Scientific Process (InnovationToronto.com)
• ‘Open Science’ Challenges Journal Tradition With Web Collaboration (nytimes.com)
• ‘Open Science’ Challenges Journal Tradition With Web Collaboration (nytimes.com)
• Open science: change is coming… (scienceintelligence.wordpress.com)
• ‘Open Science’ Challenges Journal Tradition With Web Collaboration – NYTimes.com (policyabcs.wordpress.com)
• Open science: why is it so hard? (downes.ca)
• Open science: why is it so hard? (lemire.me)
• Michael Nielsen: SPARC Innovator [Confessions of a Science Librarian] (scienceblogs.com)
• Taking a Closer Look at Peer Review (r-bloggers.com)
• I’m on peer review strike! (ucfagls.wordpress.com)
• Cracking Open the Scientific Process (3quarksdaily.com)
• University PR offices need to make peer review process clear (jodymacpherson.wordpress.com)
• The Research Works Act: Is It Time For a Rally To Restore Sanity? (scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org)
• Open Science And The Econoblogosphere (krugman.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Elsevier and Federation of Biochemical Societies Launch New Journal: FEBS Open Bio (prnewswire.com)
• Scientists, Share Your Secrets Or Lose Funding (junkscience.com)
• Publishing and the open-access model (bindingobsession.com)
• How many science journals? (scienceintelligence.wordpress.com)
• Are publishers the enemies of science? (scienceintelligence.wordpress.com)

Springer Unleashes Free SpringerLink App for iPhone, iPod Touch

From the 3 January 2012 blog item at eContent

 

Springer’s SpringerLink science platform is now available in a free mobile app for iPhone and iPod touch, which can be downloaded from the Apple App Store. The app contains articles from over 2,000 peer-reviewed journals and chapters from 49,000 books, totaling over 5.4 million documents that span multiple areas of science, technology, and medicine.

Free content in the form of article abstracts, over 127,000 open access research articles, plus book and journal covers and other document details are included in the app. The SpringerLink app includes features like personalized notifications; “save” and “share” capabilities, including enabled sharing via email, Facebook, and Twitter; advanced search options; document details, including abstracts; and full-text views, which are available to institutional subscribers.

Springer publishes nearly 500 academic and professional society journals and is a part of the Springer Science+Business Media publishing group.

(www.springerlink.com)

Many NIH-funded clinical trials go unpublished over two years after completion (with ClinicalTrials.gov link for many trial study results)

[Flahiff's note:  It is possible that  many of these unpublished clinical trial results would have made a positive difference in many people's lives. These unpublished results have the potential of aiding many researchers. They can prevent unnecessary duplicate trials, point to areas needing more research, and potentially provide groundwork for collaboration.

On another note, it is good to see that published research papers are now more accessible to all.  As of 2008, research papers based on NIH grants must be submitted to PubMed Central (PMC) when those papers are accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. PMC will then make the papers freely available to the public within 12 months of publication.

I look forward to the day when all research papers are freely available to the public.  There are a myriad of issues, as who pays for the publishing, the peer review process, and where the research papers should be "housed". However, I believe the more scientific research results are disseminated in easily accessible format, the more we can advance in technology applications and filling in knowledge gaps.]

Excerpt from the 3 January 2012 article By Karen N. Peart at Yale News

In a study that investigates the challenges of disseminating clinical research findings in peer-reviewed biomedical journals, Yale School of Medicine researchers have found that fewer than half of a sample of trials primarily or partially funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) were published within 30 months of completing the clinical trial.

These findings appear in the January issue of the British Medical Journal, which focuses on the topic of unpublished evidence.

[As of 3 January 2012, the January issue of BMJ was not yet online..however many of the articles may be found at 
http://www.bmj.com/archive/sevendays
]

“When research findings are not disseminated, the scientific process is disrupted and leads to redundant efforts and misconceptions about clinical evidence,” said Dr. Joseph Ross, first author of the study and a Yale assistant professor of medicine. “Such inaction undermines both the trial in question and the evidence available in peer-reviewed medical literature. This has far-reaching implications for policy decisions, and even institutional review board assessments of risks and benefits associated with future research studies.”…

…

Ross said that there may be many reasons for lack of publication, such as not getting accepted by a journal or not prioritizing the dissemination of research findings. Still, he said, there are alternative methods for providing timely public access to study results, including the results database at ClinicalTrials.gov** that was created in response to Federal law.

[From the About Page at Clinical Trials.gov
US Public Law 110-85 (Food and Drug Administration Amendments Act of 2007 or FDAAA), Title VIII, Section 801 mandates that a "responsible party" (i.e., the study sponsor or designated principal investigator) register and report results of certain "applicable clinical trials" that were initiated or ongoing as of September 27, 2007...]

Related Resource

ClinicalTrials.gov  offers up-to-date information for locating federally and privately supported clinical trials for a wide range of diseases and conditions.

ClinicalTrials.gov currently contains 118,682 trials sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, other federal agencies, and private industry.

**Here is how one can check for study results
(remember, researchers are not mandated to submit study results to ClinicalTrials.gov, they are voluntary)

• Go to ClinicalTrials.gov
• Click on Search (upper right corner)
• Click on Advanced Search
• Go to Study Results, use drop down menu to select Studies with results
• Fill out rest of form with as much specific information as you can
  especially search terms, conditions, and/or interventions

ClinicalTrials.gov records with published results listed via the PubMed medical literature search service.  

•         Use the Advanced Search with the search phrase clinicaltrials.gov[si]

Use the Builder  limit results by topics (as a disease, medical device), year(s), name of researcher/invesitator)

•         Need help searching? PubMed has tutorials , including a YouTube at the Advanced Search Page

        Ask for assistance from a reference librarian at your local public, academic, hospital, or medical library.
Many academic, hospital, and medical libraries offer at least basic search help to all. Call ahead and ask
about their services. You may be pleasantly surprised.

Related articles

• Many NIH-funded clinical trials go unpublished over 2 years after completion (eurekalert.org)
• The White House Calls for Information on Public Access to Publications and Data (The Scholarly Kitchen)
• How to obtain free/low cost medical and scientific articles(jflahiff.wordpress.com)
• Patients want to understand the medical literature (with links to resources for patients) (jflahiff.wordpress.com)

• Low Reporting of Clinical Trial Data in Key U.S. Database, Study Shows (Science News Daily)

• Missing trial data threatens the integrity of medicine (eurekalert.org)
• Poor patient recruitment cited in call for trial disclosures (fiercebiotechit.com)
• A Present for NIH: President Signs Law Creating New Translational Center (news.sciencemag.org)
• NIH and Non-profits Sign Research and Development Agreement (kauffman.org)
• NIH establishes National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (jflahiff.wordpress.com)