Predators

Reflections on the Biomedical Publication Industry

PubMed, run by the National Library of Medicine (NLM), is a first-class resource that lists some 30,000 biomedical journals with over 37 million citations and abstracts of biomedical literature. It indexes about 1.8 million articles a year.

With such an abundance of articles, and as science is cumulative, you would have thought we would have reached the nub of scientific research: understanding how the universe works, its laws, where we come from, and why we exist.

Unfortunately, we are some way off reaching that point. Some “scientists” seem to lack basic understanding, like the difference between a disease and a syndrome—others do not understand the difference in function between a trial and a case-control study to answer a clinical question. Researchers often use the wrong techniques, misreport or misinterpret their results, and many papers are misleading because of methodological shortcomings. 

We have already reported how editorial peer review is touted as the mark of scientific scr…