There probably are many parents of autistic children who blame MMR, whose children almost certainly were not affected by the vaccine. The fact remains that I can find no study that specifically investigates the link between regressive autism, the type of autism under suspicion, and MMR. For this reason I feel that the various studies all have a whiff of the “strawman” about them.

The other point that troubles me is that the focus of the government and medical establishment seems to be on refuting the link between MMR and autism and not on properly investigating the cause of the significant and troubling rise cases of autism.

The “diagnostic” explanation of the establishment seems to be fairly unsubstantiated, it’s almost as though these authoritative bodies feel that they merely have to suck a speculative alternative explanation out of their thumbs. Why is the diagnostic theory not subjected to the same exhaustive and repeated critique as the MMR theory? Sounds like academic bias to me.

With regard to the Danish study, it doesn’t seem to me that the diagnostic criteria changed very much within the timescale of the introduction of the MMR and the mid-nineties rise in cases of autism. How does improved diagnostics explain the rise in autism when no significant change in diagnostics has been shown to have actually been made?

I have an idea about this and I am curious to hear opinions. The “biggest” journals (NEJM, Lancet, Nature, JAMA) tend to be general medicine journals. These journals will, for example, often turn down a truly spectacular neurology article because it is too narrow a topic, too specific a specialty – the article belongs in a neurology journal, not a general medicine journal.

General medicine journals are looking for articles that are relevant to common conditions that effect very significant numbers of patients.

It seems to me that pharma companies are looking for the same thing, if for different reasons.

Could this explain the correlation to some extent?

it’s not that industry pushes its way into higher impact journals, it’s that industry push their published papers around, giving them higher visibility, and thus attracting more citations to them.

(I’m not sure I believe it explains the findings of the BMJ paper — impact factors have a four year lag, and I don’t think single articles are going to skew an IF from 3 to 8, but it’s yet another factor to consider…)

1. Journals, like all media, are self-selecting for “exciting” results. People, with limited time, tend first to read journals with “new positive” results, except perhaps within the extremely narrow niche of their own expertise, thus journals emphasizing the positive become the most broadly popular.

2. For reasons given in previous comments, given limited hours in the day, an academic’s is biased towards producing largest number of publications, positive and negative, while a private company researcher is biased towards positive results (biases based on career incentives).

Net result from the simple model is the one that’s observed, a match in goals and therefore articles between popular journals and private companies – no conspiracy necessary! Just a product of how we filter any information through media sources given limited time.

There is another factor at work as well, however, when it comes to the “big labs”, the opinion leaders that industry works with. These labs are often far beyond “publish or perish” because they have a high output with high impact anyway. In fact, a lot of minor stuff will likely lag behind and, if at all, be published ages after it has been done, because the priority just isn’t there and there’s more important results. In cases, however, where positive results from industry products are involved, there will be, albeit subtle, pressure from the industry to get going and publish these results since any day the results stay unpublished is a lost day for the company. The good news is only good news if it is heard by others. If it’s not good news, there will be no pressure to publish it and it will stay at the bottom of the big pile on the PI’s desk while more important stuff gets stacked on top of it.

However, as someone from the diagnostics industry, I’d like to point out that the issue of bias within a publication is much more complex. When we had a lab evaluate a third party device the manufacturers of which wanted us to destribute their device, we really had to watch out that the technicians actually reported negative results and didn’t attribute them to “Oh well, I screwed up pipetting that one…” The bias is all too often a conscious or subconscious self-censure on the front end based on conceptions what one thinks the sponsor wants to hear rather than pressure from the back by industry. In the specific case, we wanted to know if the machine performs as claimed before we attach our good name with it and were very thankful to know it didn’t before we ruined our reputation for high quality devices by selling people a shoddy analyzer.

1. government-funded researchers have more incentive / less inhibition to publish their “negative results”, against which there is much systemic bias, and which therefore usually end up on low impact journals. This will reduce an “average” score.

2. some people have argued (excuse my weasel words, i’m too lazy to google for a reference) that industry papers tend to overstate conclusions more than the average paper. this might get caught and corrected by the reviewers in the final version of the paper, but the hype in the early version might have been enough to persuade an editor on a high-impact journal that the paper is worth considering in the first place.

3. industry can afford to hire professional science/medical writers to assist in the construction of an attractive looking paper. govt-funded academics and doctors only have their overworked students to dump such chores on.

4. academic editors sit on editorial boards: they might be quite happy to submit to a lower impact journal if they feel some connection to it, such as being on the board.

i’m sure there are still more reasons than this.

Why I mention it is that, as several have said, an agency, or an experienced part of a company, that is good at getting through the hoops of publishing, will normally outperform an academic. Academics are like the grand version of a DIY nut — they have to do so much on their own (relatively speaking). Writing, graphic design, promotional work; none of these things = science, yet all are crucial to the way we do it.

I do agree that the pressure on academics makes them into short-termists when it comes to publishing. I really sympathise with the almost Prisoner’s Dilemma-like situation of going for a small certainty over a big gamble (and given how massively oversubsrcribed most journals are in this age of the ‘smallest publishable unit’, it is an ever-bigger gamble). Thanks to paper-based assessment like RAE (which sucks, and no it isn’t a ‘Churchillian raft’, it just sucks period because it undermines itself completely by its very nature — it’s the bad version of the Hawthorne effect if you’re a sociologist or similar). Whereas, as has been said, industry almost doesn’t need to publish (why would they, apart from to beef up their marketing material, or to an extent, to tickle academic collaborators — certainly not to get funding). I kind of get the impression that (apart from the marketing point) it is often done simply to press the happy buttons of in-house scientists, like a civil honour or something, and so that they can go to conferences (part intelligence gathering, part perk). And so their CV doesn’t get buried under dust, in case they want to go back to the public domain (or so that they at least feel that the door isn’t closed, avoiding involuntary career panic). This less-pressured approach does allow them to go for ‘big’ papers in a way that the modern academic cannot afford. Back to the smallest pulishable unit. And of course small (rapid) bites = small (easy) journals. Publication fees can also have an effect, but the best groups are far from skint tbh, and anyway _no_ department with two brain cells to rub together isn’t going to find the funds to cover the charges for a high-impact paper that will play well its next departmental assessment…

There’s a slightly seedier point about academic involvement in commercial research, which I’m sure is almost always perfectly legit, but as with anything covered by a confidentiality agreement, may be a cause for concern. Certainly there have been cases where all did not work out well (including a US Grand Jury in one unpleasant case, for example). And having a bigwig on a paper stuffed with company peeps doesn’t hurt, especially if they’re a paper factory proprietor, for all the reasons to do with familiarity/visibility rehearsed in prior posts.

Anyway, a gear change to what I thought I was going to post about: I recently attended a (ever-so-slightly-facetiously-imho-titled) Web 3.0 (no less lol — shouldn’t we be worrying about 2.0 still..?) discussion that was hosted at the BL by NPG. All great stuff, fantastic meeting, very pleasing light:heat ratio. The take-home was that scientists should be doing more to promote their work — building their own e-networks (blogging [god do I hate that word lol -- almost as cringey as "the 'brane" eugh] like mad, sharing more, collaborating more, learning more). All uncontroversially postitive. The whole ship sails smoother and faster, etc. This of course is slightly disingenuous as many academics guard the one tiny area in which they have a head start on the zillions of potential competitors looking for easy wins, because if they announce their ongoing research (open lab books, for example) then lots of them die. This is essentially an ecological argument: Replace a finely subdivided envirnoment with a big single homogenous open environment and you’ll lose species like an asteroid just hit. Same for this; the fencing-related inefficiency actually keeps academia going to an extent (think evolutionary refugia, local adaptation, allopatry and anything that can be raided from evobio). Otherwise all the little guys get killed by supergroups with the resource to go better and faster (for which they are of course rewarded with yet more resource, which I actually don’t have a big problem with as they are mostly super on account of being super, but science _will_ die without the rest of us plugging away too — pseudo-corporate science is no less pernicious [in its bad incarnation] than corporate anything else). Many scientists are not cute (many are fluffy, but not in a good way). But nonetheless, like various other kinds of ugly but crucial beasties they must be protected for the overall good of this wattle-and-daub system we have more or less blindly evolved.

Still not made my original point. It is this: My issue at the NPG discussion was that, okay, I now have lots of journals and lots of scientists that I might want to keep track of. Fine. Lots of ways to get summaries, but that simply isn’t enough. Ignoring the most glaring issue of accuracy in the reporting of the reporting of the reporting of something at best half understood by the index reporter (even ‘science reporters’ are often completely clueless — I’ve had some awful experiences with some almost wilfully dumb practitioners of the art of not listening properly or doing any preparation at all). And then there’s the process of simply propagating nuggets without unpacking them, via ‘bookmark this’ links of various kinds, that leads to who-knows-what emergent groupthink (/clusterfcuk) outcomes.

But ignoring all that, my issue is that there are already soooo many summaries. Most of the larger journals have a highlights section; there are review journals; there are review sites; there are informal lists within communities blah blah blah; and now there are bloggers. The issue is that I need someone to summarise the summaries of the summaries. As with integration of bioinformatics (or similar) tools and databases, the first proposal is usually to build a meta-thing to bring all the other things together (“But it wasn’t a dream. It was a place…”). But of course it won’t be _everyone’s_ meta-thing (US v Europe, group on group, blah blah) because we don’t live in a global dictatorship. So there is always a market for going ‘up’ a level to do the next meta-meta-meta thing. No end in sight. Same for summaries and blogging, except the channels are noisier and the information less pure to start with (because it’s bad enough when it is the real uncompressed data — it only gets worse when people start trying to summarise it — at best, some information loss, at worst…).

So summaries, great. But provenance is a huge issue, as is a kind of chinese whispers mixed with all sorts of confounding personal biases, language problems, editorial choice, mixing of opinion with fact in a forum that obscures the difference. I don’t know what the answer is, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t blogging. Blogging is either informal ‘primary’ communication (i.e. an _input_ rather than an output/summary), or simply the worst kind of recycling, now with bonus bias. That’s fine, I like bias — it adds flavour. But I like to understand how to factor it out, and how to tell unsugared fact and obvious fiction from ‘faction’/infotainment. This age of dumbing and sensationalising to appeal more broadly, rather than looking for interesting angles, has its effect on blogs too — what makes people read a blog — are there really any ‘blogs of record’ (I’m guessing no). Surely, in the same way that we’re all marketeers on eBay, we’re now all journalists on blogs? (Except we’re neither, but our amateur attempts to ape those professions has its complex and variable effect.)

An analogy: Google rank isn’t the only measure of a web page’s subjective worth if you see what I mean — i.e., a popular blog is not necessarily an accurate one (and how could we tell anyway when it is a given that we don’t have time to read more widely — this is like trusting that there really is an army of compulsive obsessives ensuring the accuracy of Walesypedia). I’d like to see more effort put into professional, publicly-funded news services (someone mentioned something like this above), built in part on blogs to get the zeitgeist, but also using other sources directly. Sadly, who does the work raises the same old issue. The NHS could definitely fill a need, as could a service sponsored by RCUK, for example. Or the Beeb (though they often struggle with science, resorting to [unconsciously] misrepresenting something so as to make it simple enough for them to understand enough to try to explain for no clear reason except when it is to scare people shitless). We can’t wish away all these diluting journal-shaped career lifeboats, so we need to do something, but I’m not a fan of community solutions when, as here, accuracy is so crucial (if the source is polluted, we’re almost looking at a Muller’s ratchet scenario where eventually the ‘good’ copy may be lost for ever and all descend from the mutant copy — that’s the undeletable internet — and [dare I say] memes — for you).

That said (and straying off-topic once again), I’m wholly in favour of our floppy-haired Manc-tastic Dr Cox, who is Attenborough-like in his ability to tack close to the wind while keeping the facts in view. More like him pah-leez. Then science might be seen as closer to general interest, and one can maybe dream that being a bit more mainstream means better-resourced news coverage (rather than cheap headlines and distortion to allow science news to cross over into general interest). It may also mean less scaremongering nonsense like the MMR thing can pass (necrotising fasciitis anyone? irradiated food? frankenstein food?) because pop news editors might start to give a shit if they are regularly laughed at for being feckless lightweights failing the public on a daily basis. Kay I’m dreaming now. Byee.

1. Page charges. Not sure what the situation is in the medical field, but in Physics the big journals have page charges (you have to pay to be published, considerably more if you want colour). Government labs frequently publish in less glamorous journals that have lower or no page charges.

2. Emphasis. If an industry-funded academic does something, it’s “medical research”. If a government bod does it, it’s “public health”.

If either of those is true, to come to NuclearChicken’s defense, then the root cause is self-censorship by the authors, rather than a nefarious plot on the part of the journals.

William

When it comes to who funds the research, I barely even know and I definitely don’t care.

In 2005 the Lancet published a letter criticising links between the publisher and the international arms trade . There was a brief defensive response from the publisher www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673605673072/fulltext, but the Lancet refused to publish a critical letter i sent based on my experience of the arms trade in Afghanistan.

The issue of a high profile medical journal continuing to publish articles about global health whilst its publisher made money from the arms trade continued to burn until 2007 when it was forced to sever its links
www.idiolect.org.uk/elsevier/

Coorporations exist primarily to make profits. They have multiple interests and we need to be aware of what they are so we can take them to account. Just as authors need to list their interests, so should journals and their publishers.

In general, pharmaceutical companies seek out ‘thought leaders’ and leading researchers in the fields related to their products. They do it simply to lend credibility to their claims and research and (no doubt) in hopes of gaining some influence.

Given that they’re working with leading scientists, it should come as no surprise that the resulting publications have a higher impact factor than the average paper.

While I’d love to get a paper into Nature/The Lancet/etc., I’m only “allowed” to submit any given article to one journal at a time (part of the standard submission boilerplate is a commitment not to submit that article to any other journal until the first journal has made a decision on whether they’ll accept it).

I’m not going to stall a potential publication for six months just on the zillion-to-one longshot of getting it into one of the superjournals unless I’ve found something so spectacularly groundbreaking as to even up the odds.

Simonk: peer review is done anonymously, at least from the point of view of the reviewers.