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Comment by thomasfedb | Hacker News Reader

As a clinician-academic who published in The Lancet during medical school, I think this goes a bit far. Unfortunately student doctors are encouraged to publish whether or not they actually have an interest in research… but that shouldn’t discount the work of those who are genuinely engaged.

But certainly we should always approach the literature critically, including the author list, journal of publication and its peer-review practices, and the methods.

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I was severely disillusioned about the quality of clinical studies.

Would you publish if the head honcho of your double-blind study insists to know what treatment a certain patient is receiving?

You have this discussion about research ethics and subsequent beratement once, and then you either mentally check out or go to another hospital.

> student doctors are encouraged to publish whether or not they actually have an interest in research… but that shouldn’t discount the work of those who are genuinely engaged.

How do you propose the interested public make the distinction between genuine engagement and forced encouragement? Isn't it the task of journals to make that distinction before publishing? I don't think you can fault the public for dismissing everything out of hand when both academia and the journals are actively turning scientific publishing into a market for lemons.

Check the incentives. I know how much pressure there is for medical students to publish research just to get into residency programs. That match process often determines where they'll live for the foreseeable future. A few years later and suddenly they have MDs and things are more set.

Likewise view an MS (the degree itself) with suspicion if it was the only good way for that person to even be in the country.

It is my (unpopular I suspect) opinion that the contents of medical or other academic journals is not intended for consumption by the “interested public” as much as I can understand the desire to do so.

That’s not the same as saying that the interested public shouldn’t be able to learn about these things, but I do think they will often need assistance from those who are trained to read and discriminate this content.

And yes, journals should also do better, and peer review should be high quality and paid (you get, ultimately, what you pay for…)

Were you first-author on an unsupervised project and paper, or did someone stake their reputation on your work?

I think this is the right distinction

As usual HN posters are hyper aware of other's credentials while ignoring that their BS in CS (if that) doesn't magically qualify them to assess everything in every domain.

"I'm a software engineer, I'm sure if I had the time to study Neuroscience, I'd figure out what all of these researchers failed to realize all these decades! I (alone) have the magic of critical and logical thinking"

A lot of us here have masters, PhDs, have published in academia, worked in the hard sciences or different engineerinf disciplines.

But I agree, when youre on the internet no ones knows you're a dog.

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