Journals hype science

In TheScientist.com's column, "The hype of science: Leading journals including Science and Nature are exaggerating research novelty," a researcher-author describes in great detail "a recent and notable case from the journal Science in which the perceived novelty and importance of a study were significantly enhanced."

You'll have to read the details yourself (registration requied). But he concludes:

"Unfortunately, this episode is not the first (or second or third) time that I have encountered such failures to properly portray the history of a field in Science or Nature with the effect, whatever the intent, of boosting the apparent significance of a newly published study."

These days I'm spending a lot of time urging journalists to cut back on their steady diet of stories from journals. Dr. John Ioannidis and others should have planted enough seeds of doubt about the veracity of claims made in many scientific journal articles. There's a lot of "boosted significance" of health, medicine and science in news stories and the integrity and credibility of science and of journalism is at stake.