 |
| They look like proper scientists. |
If you've ever had an ostensibly perfectly OK study rejected by a peer-reviewed journal with criticisms that you find picky or irrelevant, then you might have begun to develop suspicions about the sacred status of peer review. It can mean virtually anything, can't it?
If your magnum opus has then been accepted virtually unchanged by a different peer-reviewed journal, your suspicions may strengthen. But medics have it easy compared to some other areas in science. Anyone remember Climategate?
So, stepping outside of the strictly orthopaedic and medical arena, here's a nice review of why it pays to be sceptical about peer review. It doesn't take long to read.
And while I'm on the subject of research methodology/publishing, what's so great about RCT's? I know that they're allegedly the gold standard, but they are very difficult to pull off in surgery with enough power in the study, and often end up with endpoints of dubious clinical relevance, just because they're easy to quantify. Think of all the utterly irrelevant distal DVT's on scanning in the industry-led thromboprophylaxis trials.
Level 3 or 4 evidence - such as a well-documented cohort study of sufficient size, can be far more convincing (more soon). It may be a bit dry, but this review of RCT's in orthopaedics is worth skimming at least. It's salutary to recall what Lord Rutherford said: "If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment"
I'll post elsewhere on the whole DVT thing, part of the pleasure in it is seeing that antipathy between physicians and surgeons can be universal
No comments:
Post a Comment