Do You Believe the Research You're Reading? Think Again

As an undergraduate student, I vividly remember my favorite psychology professor complaining he could not reproduce a couple of well-known published studies, even though he had carefully followed the steps to do so.

"I'm beginning to think that much of the research I look at is garbage!" he exclaimed as he lit up his cigar. "The statistics are manipulated ... or just made up!" It was a surprising statement to me then, but I had no idea how prescient it would be.

Questioning the Research

That memory came back to me when I came upon an article written by an acquaintance of mine, Alan Gaby, MD. Alan is well-known for his many years of analyzing nutritional and medical research in relation to integrative therapeutics. In a commentary in the July 2019 issue of the Townsend Letter, he wrote, "Over the past 5 to 10 years, an uncomfortably large and growing number of published papers related to my area of expertise have left me wondering whether the research was fabricated; that is, whether people were writing papers about research that had not actually been conducted."¹

He is not the only one. I have found there is an increasing awareness among scientists that plagiarism, fabrication and downright fraud exists in health research, and on an international level. The more I looked into this topic, the more shocking it became. Here I am, a humble clinician, trying to help patients based on what I learn from research – that might not be true!

One of the earliest "woke" scientists regarding troubled research is the prominent statistician John Ioannidis of Stanford. As early as 2005, he felt bold enough to write an article in PLoS Medicine titled, "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False."² The article certainly annoyed many of his colleagues, but it helped spark an important question...

What the Heck Is Going On?

First of all, "publish or perish" is a phrase researchers understand. It means, "You will be out of a job if you can't show how smart you are!" Getting one's work in a serious professional journal has always been important, and always difficult because of the limited number of journals.

But times changed. Jeffrey Beall, formerly of the University of Colorado, is credited for exposing the rapidly growing number of journals of questionable quality. He called them "predatory journals." In 2017, he set forth criteria for defining "junk" publications.³ Some of those criteria include pretending to use peer review, or mimicking the name and website style of more established journals. Most of all, no one's work is ever rejected. But to finally get one's article in the journal, a significant publishing fee must be paid.

The number of "predatory" articles, as defined by Beall's list, increased from 53,000 in 2010 to 420,000 in about 8,000 predatory journals by 2014. As reported by Robin Young in Orthopedics This Week, at least 225 potentially predatory journals were identified in orthopedics alone!⁴

C. Niek van Dijk, an orthopedist at the University of Amsterdam, wrote about this topic in an editorial in Joint Disorders & Orthopaedic Sportsmedicine.⁵ He describes a "predatory" conference on sports medicine at which the speakers had to pay more to present there than did the attendees! He also reported that a 2016 study of colleagues revealed each one received over two spam e-mails a day inviting them to publish in phony journals and attend phony conferences.

The temptation to pad one's curriculum vitae appears to be strong, but the larger issue is "publication fraud, dishonesty, and deceit." That is what Chad Cook PT, PhD, said in 2012 in an editorial in the Journal of Manual and Manipulative Therapy.⁶

He divided this topic into two categories: type "A" intentions, associated with careless errors, failure to obtain relevant data or downright laziness; and type "B" errors, involving premeditated fabrication of data, falsifying statistics and misleading conclusions. Scientists who have gone to the dark side of type B behavior have usually done so because of increased competition for journal placement, grant money or prestigious appointments. Publish or perish.

What Can Be Done About It

Cheating may be difficult to uncover, but when it is discovered, journals should publish a retraction, stating what was wrong and why the author's work was deleted. A website called Retractionwatch.com follows the number of retractions per publication and reports the stories of the "why" behind the retraction. I must say it is one of the more enlightening sites I could find concerning the problem of fraud and author deceit.  Check it out. You will find copious examples of researchers breaking bad.

Part 2 of this article will provide a few examples of what happens when honest researchers are so fed up with fraudulent articles that they devise "stings" to test the integrity of publishers. One of my favorite examples: an editorial in the Journal of Orthopaedic and Sports Physical Therapy by Dr. Cook titled, "Manual Therapy Cures Death:  I Think I Read That Somewhere." Yes, he got an article published about spinal manipulation bringing a patient back to life, who incidently, had been dead for five years.⁷ Stay tuned.

References

1. Gaby A. "Why Am I Believing More and More Nutrition Research Less and Less?" Townsend Letter, 2019;432:94,96.
2. Ioannidis J. "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False." PLoS Med, 2005;2(8):e124.
3. Beall J. "Criteria for Determining Predatory Open-Access Publishers." Beall's List: https://beallslist.net/.
4. Young R. "Research Predators and Parasites: Slamming the Door." Orthopedics This Week, Dec. 13, 2018.
5. Van Dijk C. "Misconduct in Science:  The Panama Papers and More, Much More." Joint Dis Ortho Sportsmed, 2018;3(6).
6. Cook C. "Publication Fraud, Dishonesty, and Deceit." JMPT, 2012; May 20(2):57-58.
7. Cook  C. "Manual Therapy Cures Death: I Think I Read That Somewhere." J Ortho Sports Phys Ther, 2018 Nov;48(11):830-832.