Part I: Visiting the United States in November 2016 As I write this, I am on a train travelling from Boston to New York City, at a time when people in the United States are still coming to terms with what they thought they knew about their country. The trip has been rushed because I need … Continue reading Why the inequalities in our information diets matter (Part 1 of 2)
You might remember me from such articles as "Even Systematic Reviews are Pretty Easy to Manipulate" and "I Can Predict the Conclusion of Your Review Even Without Reading It". If you have been around for a while you may even remember me from "Industry-based Researchers get More Love Because They are Better Connected". In a web browser near you, see the … Continue reading Five tips for controlling the evidence base of your clinical intervention
Published research varies across a spectrum that at one end is simply marketing masquerading as genuine inquiry. Actors in lab coats. To counter this problem, every time research is published in a journal, the authors are expected to declare anything that might have affected their impartiality in that work. Unfortunately, we very rarely do anything … Continue reading So you’ve found a competing interest disclosure. Now what?
So...I have been systematically collecting tweets about human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines since October 2013. We now have over two hundred thousand tweets that included keywords related to HPV vaccines, and the first of two pieces of research we have undertaken using these data has just been published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research. It covers 6 … Continue reading Twitter users with anti-vaccine opinions are relatively easy to spot if we can measure their misinformation exposure
Short version: We published a new article in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology all about selective citation in reviews of neuraminidase inhbitors - like Tamiflu and Relenza. Lots of reviews get written about drugs (especially the ones that get prescribed often), and the drugs used to treat and prevent influenza are no exception. There are more reviews written … Continue reading How to predict the conclusion of a review without even reading it…
As usual, I'm keeping a record of major stories in the media related to a recently published paper. I will continue to update this post to reflect the media response to our article in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Michael McCarthy from the BMJ covered the research, including asking extra questions. Melissa Davey from Guardian covered … Continue reading Media collection about conflicts of interest in systematic reviews of neuraminidase inhibitors