fraud, forgery, and fake news in the medical literature forgeries fo… · fraud, forgery, and fake...
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FRAUD, FORGERY, AND FAKE NEWS IN THE MEDICAL LITERATURE
DAVID MASLOVE, MD, MS, FRCPCQUEEN’S UNIVERSITY
KINGSTON, ONTARIO, CANADA
Critical Care Canada ForumNovember 13, 2019
@DavidMaslove
DISCLOSURES
•Financial - none•Other - Associate Editor at Critical Care Medicine
•(views are my own)
Who can you trust?
What is “true”?
THE CHANGING MEDIA LANDSCAPE
THE CHANGING MEDIA LANDSCAPE
MEDICAL
THE CHANGING MEDIA LANDSCAPE
MEDICAL
PEER REVIEW
PEER REVIEW
PREDATORY JOURNALS
PREPRINTS
PREDATORY JOURNALS
“PREPRINTS”
WHAT IS A PREDATORY JOURNAL?1. The journal’s operations are deceptive
2. Not in keeping with best practices (eg.
COPE)
3. Low transparency regarding operations
4. Promotes fake impact factors
5. No retraction policy
6. Contact details not easily verifiable
7. “Look and feel” of being unprofessional
8. Solicits manuscripts through aggressive
emailsCukier et al. Defining predatory journals and responding to the threat they pose: a
modified Delphi consensus process. medRxiv Nov 2, 2019.
Tom Spears,
Ottawa
Citizen
Tom Spears,
Ottawa
Citizen
Open Access Publishing
Predatory Journals
1. Is it a predator or legit
Open Access?
2. Probably bad for science
3. Could be bad for your
career
PEER REVIEW
PREDATORY JOURNALS
PREPRINTS
PREPRINTS
PREPRINTS
Room for debate
1. By definition preprints are not peer
reviewed
2. Medicine ≠ Physics
3. Do preprints have to look like peer
reviewed articles?
4. Likely to end up in citations
PREPRINTS
Maslove DM. Medical preprints – A debate worth having. JAMA 2018.
PREDATORY JOURNALS
“PREPRINTS”
WHAT IS A PREDATORY JOURNAL?1. The journal’s operations are deceptive
2. Not in keeping with best practices (eg.
COPE)
3. Low transparency regarding operations
4. Promotes fake impact factors
5. No retraction policy
6. Contact details not easily verifiable
7. “Look and feel” of being unprofessional
8. Solicits manuscripts through aggressive
emailsCukier et al. Defining predatory journals and responding to the threat they pose: a
modified Delphi consensus process. medRxiv Nov 2, 2019. PREPRINT!
“Safety Checks”1. Authors must show evidence of
ethics approval, consent2. Authors must disclose funding
sources3. Submissions are screened by an
external clinical scientist and and a clinical editor
4. If concerns in screening, paper is escalated to a clinical editor
5. Final decision could be made by six-person management team
“All manuscripts are screened on submission for plagiarism, non-scientific content, inappropriate article types, and material that could potentially endanger the health of individual patients or the public.”
Bias
Quality
Agenda
Fraud
Important!…but not iron-clad.
PEER REVIEW
“…democracy is the worst form of government except for all those
other forms that have been tried from time to time…”
—Sir Winston Churchill
PEER REVIEW
publishing
Peer review
The Takeaway
The landscape of biomedical publishing is changing
(rapidly), introducing new threats to the validity,
integrity, and trustworthiness of medical research (and
by extension, practice). This has direct and immediate
implications for all of us, and all of our patients.
“And with that I’ll take some questions”
An online community of peer-review enthusiasts.
The Golden Rule of Peer Review
“For every manuscript you submit, accept (at least) one peer review invitation*”
* Also you never know when you might get invited to write an editorial
The Takeaway
Scrutinize science without undermining public trust
vs.
How anti-vaxxers do
statistics:
If you have 4 pencils and I
have 7 apples, how many
pancakes will fit on the roof?
Purple, because aliens don’t
wear hats.
vs
• Walking a tightrope. We need to be skeptical of fake
news in the medical literature (and in the lay literature),
without causing panic and sowing distrust among the
public in the enterprise of medical science. There’s
enough of this as it is (see anti-vax). It’s critical we get
things right so that we can point to an air-tight process
when dealing with the public.
N.B. there’s good correlation between Petit tightrope walking between towers and the fate of those buildings, but probably not causal
The Takeaway
•Watch out for phishing
attempts
•Watch who you’re citing
•Consider how your
analysis is conducted and
reported
•Keep up with emerging
tools and trends
•You can’t outsource critical
appraisal
•Consider the source, consider
the peer review, consider the
conflicts of interest (and of
course, consider the merits of
the study)
•It’s a lot more work, isn’t it?!
For Producers For Consumers
Anyone can read*
*Provided you’ve paid the subscription fee
º37% profit margin
Publisher 2017 Revenue
Elsevier US$ 3.2 billionº
Springer Nature US$ 1.9 billion
Wiley US$ 1.7 billion
Eddy TD. Plan-S: Motivations of for-profit publishers.
Science 1 FEBRUARY 2019 • VOL 363 ISSUE 6426
Elise H. Nature. 04 SEPT 2018
20% OF PAPERS ARE PUBLISHED OPEN ACCESS.THIS ILLUSTRATES THE WILLINGNESS OF AUTHORS TO PAY TO HAVE THEIR WORK PUBLISHED.
SOME HAVE RECOGNIZED THIS AS A BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY…
