The Influence of Pro-inflammatory Cytokines and Genetic Variants in the Development of Fibromyalgia: A Traditional Review, 2020, Peck et al

Open access, https://www.cureus.com/articles/394...elopment-of-fibromyalgia-a-traditional-review

 

Quote from Study Limitations:

Our article depends on reviewing free full-text research articles from the last 10 years, therefore there is a chance we have left out important information from paid full-text as well as from research articles published before 2010. We did not implement quality assessment of the chosen research studies. A systematic review was not performed.

Whoa. Authors didn't have institutional library access to pay-walled articles?

 

"traditional review"? I guess they mean narrative-review...

 

Yea the whole thing (paying for access to peer reviewed journals) is a mess - Much published research is publicly funded e.g. through direct Government funding; gradually there seems to be a move to require this to be made available to the public (free access via the internet). Not all research research publications are available free; that even applies to research which was wholly/partly funded by the public!

Don't know the specifics here but it's a problem more generally.

Then there's the issue that some peer reviewed research isn't good quality --- so there's a question mark over whether the peer reviewed system really provides quality assurance. After PACE I'm not surprised about the concerns over quality assurance. There's been talk of just moving to a system of University X publishes it's own research --- then it gets vetted via open forums. Problem is it's all linked back to assessing the quality of research institutes --- so difficult to replace.