A lot of people don’t know that Ghislaine Maxwell’s dad, Robert Maxwell, played a pivotal role in setting up the system for how science research gets published today.
His legacy has been catastrophic for science, and in this video, I explain why:
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Thank you!
This is, without a doubt, the most clear and articulate expose of the peer review industry I've ever seen. Peer review publishing has become such a sacred cow, and this concise overview dismantles the charade from the very root.
I'm extremely grateful to have found your work, Joomi, and I'm eagerly looking forward to anything more you care to share on these vitally important issues!
Outstanding mini-lecture on this topic. I have a personal experience which corroborates some of what you stated and also adds one more element to the overall picture. Around 35-40 years ago, at the beginning of my medical career, I used to read many medical journals. My undergraduate background was in biochemistry, and I loved reading, so I would read entire textbooks, and entire journals articles, including the methods and results sections. As an aside, I was one of the very few medical students or doctors who did this. Most just absorbed whatever the first thing their mentor taught them and rarely read anything critically. Two of the very popular journals I read were JAMA and NEJM. Over the years I noticed several disturbing trends. First, the authors conclusions began to detach from the results. In other words, I would read the entire paper and then question how they could possibly reach their stated conclusion based on their results. Additionally I would notice that their methods were not well designed and were structured to guarantee their conclusion. I also noticed that over time the percentage of total pages devoted to pharmaceutical advertisements kept increasing, reaching almost 50% of total pages by the time I cancelled my subscriptions. A little bit of digging on my part revealed that almost universally, the authors conclusions aligned with the financial interests of their grantor or sponsor. Who knows how many papers get rejected because the conclusion does not support the institutions or journals financial backers, which now includes pharma advertisers. Finally, on an even more pessimistic note, very few doctors, researchers, scientists, etc. even read the methods and results sections. They just read the conclusion and then regurgitate it like it's gospel. The results section can now be all fudged data and very few investigators will notice. Finally, as you stated, rarely if ever, does a true unbiased investigator try to replicate the results on any of these papers. As you alluded to, I bet that if an attempt were made to replicate results, we would find a shockingly low percentage of the results would be replicated. I have reached the point where I am supremely skeptical of any mainstream article or report and pay much more attention to information from people with as little conflict of interest as possible.