Paul Whaley

We agree on that, I was just seeing a few people on Bluesky seeming to think this was the end of PubMed - which people are worried about already.

This most likely relates to the Federal shutdown and is not a discontinuation of PubMed, don't panic!

Yep, don't panic - this is a federal shutdown notice, not a discontinuation of PubMed. I know we are not all exactly optimistic about the direction of scientific activities and funding under the current US administration but I'm not too worried about PubMed.

It is literally right there in their code of conduct ffs royalsociety.org/-/media/abou...

Quick skim: items 10, 11, 12, 13, and 20. If you include Grok, 7.

Huh wot dis is it code of conduct royalsociety.org/-/media/abou...

Seems consistent enough for a society that has had its fair share of eugenicists. 🤷

Apropos uncertainty: the absolute job we have in my field of getting people to understand that low certainty evidence does not mean bad evidence, and that yes you bloody well can do things when you are not certain about the benefits (or harms) I mean jfc you ever heard of opinion polls lol arrrrgggh

You can rely on Gordon to take the side of the patient (and sometimes be naive about who he teams up with). What was anyone otherwise expecting from the guy?

I think Klein is not able to defend liberalism because he thinks that if society chooses to be illiberal, then that's fine - so long as it does so via an appropriate democratic and participatory process. Which sounds like a weird thing to say, but it feels like he has talked himself into that view.

His intro to his recent podcast "building the blue scare" had some peculiar and possibly illuminating turns of phrase around McCarthyism and the earlier foundations of the red scare, where it sounds like he thinks it was a politically legitimate movement because of consensus-building and buy-in.

I should tag @whaleactually.com because he loves this sort of thing

I should add, I think it is FANTASTIC that Environmental Health makes reviewer comments available, because while this is clearly an epic screw-up, the mechanism is in place for correcting this error. Let's see if the self-correcting mechanisms of research that we are all so proud kick in...

Environmental Health Established in 2002, Environmental Health has an international readership and is rated in the top 25% of journals in this field. It covers primarily original ...

The reviewer comments and author responses are here. Take a look. Paging @twpiggott.bsky.social who may be interested, and thanks to @epiellie.bsky.social for spotting the reviewer comments in her substack about the article. ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

I did not realise the reviewer comments are available for the tylenol / autism SR. They are a fantastic case study in how editors can screw up, allowing authors to fake out a revision process because they are not sufficiently experienced to see what is going on and/or empowered to call it out.

Stop kinkshaming

How we promote rigour in systematic reviews and evidence maps at Environment International In 2016, Environment International became the first environmental health journal to adopt specialist policies for handling systematic review (SR) subm…

I should also have shamelessly promoted this fantastic piece of work, where I mansplain everything I think I know about editing that you were afraid to ask. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

They didn't rot though.

Also my god. I had some friends (yes, past tense they all died) who tested their theory that more garlic was always more delicious, made a corned beef hash with twelve bulbs, so we just dug a pit and buried them in that.

How keen are the victims I mean diners on garlic skin?

I have no idea what the recipe calls for specifically, but when I found out I could crush garlic cloves in a garlic crusher *without* having to peel them first I considered it a life-changing moment. (You can just lift the skin out afterward.) Of course, if dicing the garlic, different matter.

Just wanted to share a really nice poster by @carrieprice.bsky.social and colleagues. As someone who deliberately invited librarians a lot when I was editing systematic reviews, I can vouch for what they add. Specific info about attitudes and priorities is really interesting. osf.io/8khyp

Wrong!

It's just pretend science, it is absolutely ludicrous that this was published in current form.

3/? 8. Oh look finally the research question. It is ambiguous and vague. 9. No DAGs or other theory for the causal analysis or triangulation approach as far as I can tell. 10. They really are averaging their bias scores my gosh. 11. I have no clue how they got to their conclusion, it's just words.

2/? 4. Search = meh but OK I guess. 5. No biological theory to establish prior plausibility of central hypothesis. 6. Confused risk of bias assessment, treating ordinal ratings as continuous. 7. Weird synthesis method without attempt at quantitative approach, reasons for this unconvincing.

Okay, here goes (not separating the validity issues from the editorial issues): 1. No preregistered protocol. 2. General poor reporting structure and level of detail. 3. Incorrect claim to follow Navigation Guide methodology, alongside constant appeals to NG authority. 1/?

Their three-parter on Churchill ruined all other history spodcasts for me.

Systematic reviews and meta-analyses for the WHO/ILO Joint Estimates of the Work-related Burden of Disease and Injury

It's probably worth adding that the methods used in this so-called "systematic review" bear about as much resemblance to the approach articulated by the Navigation Guide as I do to Megan Thee Stallion. A more honest implementation is shown in these WHO SRs. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I am late to the party, there was a load of noise about this three weeks ago on Twitter. Oh dear.

It's just one review and there are many bigger fish to fry than this, so I hope it sinks without a trace - but it is shocking to me that it was ever published.