Do Medical Journals Publish Original Work Anymore? Enough already with meta-analyses

[Jaybee00]

https://www.medpagetoday.com/blogs/revolutionandrevelation/75045

Amen

 

[Snowdrop]

Part of the authors conclusion:

[What should we do? It is time that journal editors agreed to a moratorium on the publication of meta-analyses, especially those whose analyses are based on very few events reported in only a handful of trials. Sadly, the current peer-review process no longer provides an effective means of identifying the very few meta-analyses that are truly worthy of publication.

If editors do not act collectively and constructively to stop the current epidemic, the metastasis of meta-analyses will extinguish any vitality that still remains in medical journals. The number of papers reporting already published data will exceed the number of papers reporting original data.]

 

[rvallee]

That's one side of the problem.

The other is the 800 identical trials or reviews of "is CBT the cure for CFS" or "is anxiety the cause of CFS". Besides a crisis of replicability, there is another huge crisis of doing the exact same stuff over and over again despite always finding a negative answer.

So much damn pointless waste and it's depressing that no one seems bothered by it. If anything there will be more of it before it finally ends up in flames.

 

[James Morris-Lent]

That's one side of the problem.

The other is the 800 identical trials or reviews of "is CBT the cure for CFS" or "is anxiety the cause of CFS". Besides a crisis of replicability, there is another huge crisis of doing the exact same stuff over and over again despite always finding a negative answer.

So much damn pointless waste and it's depressing that no one seems bothered by it. If anything there will be more of it before it finally ends up in flames.

This is why PACE is so excellent, in my opinion. It was definitive and showed people outside of the cabal that the whole project is definitively not helpful.

I doubt they'll ever make the mistake of doing a definitive trial again. Better to just spam smaller manufactured results that give much more wiggle-room.

 

[Sean]

I doubt they'll ever make the mistake of doing a definitive trial again.

Might be pushing their luck asking for that kind of money again.

 

[Trish]

Might be pushing their luck asking for that kind of money again.

Most of these trials in the UK seem to be funded by the NIHR (National Institute for Health Research), not the MRC (Medical Research Council). I wonder if you added up all these small junk trials and the bigger more well known ones like SMILE, FITNET, PRINCE etc it might actually add up to more than the £5 million that was reputed to be spent on PACE. I should think Chalder and Crawley between them have soaked up several million.

 

[Snow Leopard]

How else will we write Wikipedia articles that state our views if not by performing biased meta-analyses for the purpose of confirming our a-priori beliefs?

 

[JES]

That's one side of the problem.

The other is the 800 identical trials or reviews of "is CBT the cure for CFS" or "is anxiety the cause of CFS". Besides a crisis of replicability, there is another huge crisis of doing the exact same stuff over and over again despite always finding a negative answer.

So much damn pointless waste and it's depressing that no one seems bothered by it. If anything there will be more of it before it finally ends up in flames.

What they are doing is by definition how Einstein defined insanity. I wonder in what other research career you can keep proposing the same hypothesis for decades after decades if it only produces muddled, let alone negative results. PACE has solved one part of the problem, but it seems the next step is to muddle things even further with proposing the functional/somatization categories.