Not quite useless

[Richard Feinman <RFeinman@downstate.edu>]

Useless would be extreme, but in disciplines where there is an 
overwhelming majority opinion and entrenched establishment, it 
can approach uselessness, or worse, danger.  Remember, Galileo 
had peer review from Cardinal Bellarmine. (Of course, Elesevier 
published him, anyway). In my own field, the diet-heart-low-fat 
idea is so pervasive, and the lipophobes, as they are now called, 
control editorial boards and most reviewers so that that taking 
an opposing view has a substantially reduced chance of getting a 
fair review or being published or, if published, of being cited. 
Conversely, anything marginally supporting low-fat diets or the 
associated "only calories count" idea can easily get published. 
In the end, there usually is a place to publish things and no one 
really has the time to fight, but the corruption of peer review 
in this area makes the bulk of nutritional literature close to 
useless.

Similarly, standards of methodology are so firmly entrenched that 
if you question them, you will have a hard time getting them 
published.  The exception is the skewering of random control 
trials by Smith & Pell ( BMJ 2003;327;1459-1461 ) described 
correctly as both funny and profound (although it had little 
impact).

My own attempt to point out the limitations, if not absurdity, of 
Intention-to-treat was met with actual hostility from two public 
health journals.  I finally gave up and decided to publish in 
Nutrition & Metabolism of which I was co-editor at the time, my 
co-editor sending it out for review.  Due to a computer screw-up 
(normally locks me out of info on my own submission), the 
reviewer (who I had actually suggested) was identified to me and 
I told him that his review would not be anonymous.  He said that 
was Ok and proceeded to give me an incredible hard time, with one 
(obviously to me) meaningless objection after another.  Until 
another editor stepped in, it looked like I could not get the 
paper published in my own journal.  If you don't know about ITT, 
I recommend it for a view of the state of medical research (and I 
quote one of the other reviews in the paper): 
http://www.nutritionandmetabolism.com/content/pdf/1743-7075-6-1.pdf

An appropriate principle to fix things would be that papers on 
controversial subjects must have reviewers from both sides of the 
controversy, more or less requiring giving up on anonymity.

Richard D. Feinman
Professor of Biochemistry
Clinical Professor of Family Practice
SUNY Downstate Medical Center
(718) 871-1374
FAX: (718) 270-3316

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"B.G. Sloan" <bgsloan2@yahoo.com>
Sent by: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
06/14/09 04:50 PM
Re: Hoax Article Accepted by OA Bentham Journal

Thomas Krichel writes: "...we all know that peer review is a 
vague concept to the point of being useless."

Really? I don't mean to sound naive or skeptical. Can Thomas 
Krichel point us to some empirical studies that show peer review 
is useless?

Bernie Sloan
Sora Associates

--- On Fri, 6/12/09, Thomas Krichel <krichel@openlib.org> wrote:

From: Thomas Krichel <krichel@openlib.org>
Subject: Hoax Article Accepted by OA Bentham Journal
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Date: Friday, June 12, 2009, 9:39 PM

B.G. Sloan writes

> http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6664637.html

Same old. Bentham Science have been dismissed as a junk publisher
quite a few times on this list and similar fora, and we all know
that peer review is a vague concept to the point of being
useless.

Cheers,

Thomas Krichel