Medical Hypotheses fails the Aids test

[n2doc]

September 12th, 2009 by Ben Goldacre in bad science
Ben Goldacre, 12 September 2009, The Guardian

This week the peer review system has been in the newspapers, after a survey of scientists suggested it had some problems. This is barely news. Peer review – where articles submitted to an academic journal are reviewed by other scientists from the same field for an opinion on their quality – has always been recognised as problematic. It is timeconsuming, it could be open to corruption, and it cannot prevent fraud, plagiarism, or duplicate publication, although in a more obvious case it might. The problem with peer review is, it’s hard to find anything better.

Here is one example of a failing alternative. This month, after a concerted campaign by academics aggregating around websites such as Aidstruth.org, academic publishers Elsevier have withdrawn two papers from a journal called Medical Hypotheses. This academic journal is a rarity: it does not have peer review, and instead, submissions are approved for publication by its one editor.

Articles from Medical Hypotheses have appeared in this column quite a lot. They carried one almost surreally crass paper in which two italian doctors argued that “mongoloid” really was an appropriate term for people with Down syndrome after all, because they share many characteristics with oriental populations (including: sitting cross legged; eating small amounts of lots of different types of food with MSG in it; and an enjoyment of handicrafts). You might also remember two pieces discussing the benefits and side effects of masturbation as a treatment for nasal congestion.

The papers withdrawn this month step into a new domain of foolishness. Both were from the community who characterise themselves as “Aids dissidents”, and one was co-authored by their figureheads, Peter Duesberg and David Rasnick.

more:

http://www.badscience.net/2009/09/medical-hypotheses-fails-the-aids-test/#more-1342

[lapfog_1]

1. Good God.

Why would anyone read such a rag?

I used to peer review articles all the time for various publications... it's a time consuming process and, sometime, tedious. The the authors and sometimes even the publishers are hounding you to finish the review. Especially from Academia. Publish or perish is the old adage, and it's not far off. Now it's publish FIRST or perish.

But good lord... a single editor who is without (apparently) any critical thinking skills?

That's not a solution, but simply a worse problem.

[Th1onein]

2. Medical Hypotheses is one of the few journals that take hypothesis pieces.

And what a shame if we were to lose that because of one stupid editor.

[lapfog_1]

3. I don't do peer review anymore, and never for the medical field

So I'm not aware of what publications are available, but it would seem that you could submit an hypothesis piece to a more general science publication, could you not? Might not receive the same serious attention by the medical field, but at this point, being published in this journal would seem to be dicey as far as being taken seriously is concerned.

Well, maybe mainstream science wouldn't take such articles either as not general enough.

[Th1onein]

4. Like I said, one of the VERY few that take hypothesis articles.

Believe me, I submitted an hypothesis piece to many journals, and was turned down by them BECAUSE they don't usually take hypothesis pieces. Then, when it was published in Med Hypotheses, I got an extremely positive response from the scientific community, and now a new drug is coming out in Europe, based upon my work. I published before any other scientist in the field, and there were only three of us publishing on this topic, period.

Even if I do say so, myself, it's a beautiful piece of work, very elegant, and I have moved science further along by publishing it.