ME/CFS Skeptic - How many scientific papers are fake?

ME CFS Data Sloth also works

 

Excellent blog, as usual.

I suspect there isn't a lot of outright fraud in the ME/CFS field, just incompetence, vested interests, and third-rate researchers with niche ideas. Academic fraudsters aren't going to choose a field where it's difficult to attract funding, difficult to publish in high-impact journals and where research attracts significant critical scrutiny.

Having said that, last year I came across a paper with "tortured phrases", obviously the product of some automated tool, although it wasn't a biomedical paper.

 

Ha, that's interesting. So post-exertional malaise became 'submit-exertional malaise'?

 

Yup. Looking back at the paper I spotted another one, too - "capability player bias" (probably an automated rephrasing of "participant bias").

Didn't quite know what to make of it at the time; only heard of the concept of "tortured phrases" recently.

 

On Twitter Wigglethemouse also suggested this study as problematic:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Kurup+RK%5BAuthor%5D+digoxin%5BTitle%5D

https://twitter.com/user/status/1901722085409648849


And the Perez study using 23 and ME data:
Genetic Predisposition for Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: A Pilot Study 2019 Perez Nathanson Klimas et al | Science for ME

https://twitter.com/user/status/1901723670294532136

 

That link was to a range of papers for Digoxin in various diseases, all suspiciously similar. This is the link to the ME one.
HYPOTHALAMIC DIGOXIN, CEREBRAL CHEMICAL DOMINANCE AND MYALGIC ENCEPHALOMYELITIS

 

Here is a paper describing the errors of the Perez et al paper. The major errors were easy to spot with spot checking.
Re-analysis of Genetic Risks for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome From 23andMe Data Finds Few Remain