A new paper in PLoS Medicine is of great interest to me: PLOS Medicine: Misrepresentation of Randomized Controlled Trials in Press Releases and News Coverage: A Cohort Study. Bad press releases drive me crazy. And it has been shown that press releases can frequently be a source of scientific misinformation in the press. Interestingly this paper concludes that spin in the papers themselves is correlated to spin in press releases ... So in other words, the scientists are partly to blame ... Not shocking but interesting ...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
-
I have a hardback version of The Bird Way by Jennifer Ackerma n but had not gotten around to reading it alas. But now I am listening to th...
-
There is a spreading surge of PDF sharing going on in relation to a tribute to Aaron Swartz who died a few days ago. For more on Aaron ... -
Wow. Just wow. And not in a good way. Just got an email invitation to a meeting. The meeting is " THE FIRST ANNUAL WINTER Q-BIO ...
Goes well with this PLoS-1 paper:
ReplyDelete"Why Most Biomedical Findings Echoed by Newspapers Turn Out to be False: The Case of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder" http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0044275
"Because newspapers preferentially echo initial ADHD findings appearing in prominent journals, they report on uncertain findings that are often refuted or attenuated by subsequent studies. If this media reporting bias generalizes to health sciences, it represents a major cause of distortion in health science communication."