Spin found in clinical trial abstracts in top psychology and psychiatry journals
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Re: Spin found in clinical trial abstracts in top psychology and psychiatry journals
#2They're called soft sciences for a reason, they're more about interpretation and opinion than hard irrefutable evidence. So this is not surprising, it's probably quite a bit higher than 50% too, and in all of the soft science fields where agendas or political motives may be present; sociology, psychology, political science, some archaeology, etc
Re: Spin found in clinical trial abstracts in top psychology and psychiatry journals
#3I think this is a natural outcome of the peer review process; you're not targeting research papers at statistical models, you're targeting them at human reviewers. This kind of behavior is equally prevalent in many fields, including computer science.
I recently reviewed a paper from a research team in China, on a scalable and ubiquitous ad hoc sensing platform. The presented "spin" was that it could potentially be useful for monitoring power distribution networks, thereby reducing blackouts, which was certainly true. However, it could also have been used for an inescapable, totalitarian panopticon (this part was implicit and unstated).
As a reviewer with explicit instructions to evaluate the ethical implications of the work, is it my responsibility (A) to interpret the stated "spin", (B) extract and evaluate strictly the technical contributions of the work, or (C) all of the above, and the implicit "anti-spin" interpretation that was provided courtesy of my Western worldview?
And here's a twist - six months previously, a similar situation occurred with my own work, in which a technology that I envisioned (spun) being used for disaster relief caught the eye of an alphabet agency for low-cost, secure data collection in third world theaters. This was deeply shocking to me at the time, because I hadn't considered this potential use case when I was developing the system. I had spun its impact so effectively in my own mind, I didn't even see the negative alternative.
It's my observation that human brains will inject their own spin if it doesn't already exist, using the social and cultural norms to which that brain is accustomed. I don't hold a researcher's desire to sell their work as effectively as possible against them, especially if the person to whom they're selling most effectively is themselves.
Re: Spin found in clinical trial abstracts in top psychology and psychiatry journals
#4This article might be spin itself, given how it captures attention with the accusation but hides what was actually tested with the circumlocation "a previously published definition of spin". For all I know, they just counted every abstract that contained the word "may" and called it spin.
Re: Spin found in clinical trial abstracts in top psychology and psychiatry journals
#5Also: "Spin" found in over 50% of top quantum mechanics journal abstracts.
Re: Spin found in clinical trial abstracts in top psychology and psychiatry journals
#6They're called soft sciences for a reason, they're more about interpretation and opinion than hard irrefutable evidence. So this is not surprising, it's probably quite a bit higher than 50% too, and in all of the soft science fields where agendas or political motives may be present; sociology, psychology, political science, some archaeology, etc
If you can't follow the scientific method most of the time, should their work be considered science at all?
Re: Spin found in clinical trial abstracts in top psychology and psychiatry journals
#7They're called soft sciences for a reason, they're more about interpretation and opinion than hard irrefutable evidence. So this is not surprising, it's probably quite a bit higher than 50% too, and in all of the soft science fields where agendas or political motives may be present; sociology, psychology, political science, some archaeology, etc
If you can't follow the scientific method most of the time, should their work be considered science at all?
This is my concern. If you can only partially trust the science journals because the science is faulty, what “science” can you trust? ... unless you attempt replicate every piece of research yourself?
Re: Spin found in clinical trial abstracts in top psychology and psychiatry journals
#8The issue is probably two-pronged:
1. There is pressure from the department (and funders, as the article mentions) to produce publications. The need to publish leads to researchers to spin null results as a way to "cash in" the time and effort put into a research project (I'm assuming good intentions here on the part of the researchers).
2. Articles get published if the authors can argue that their work makes a new and unique contribution to the field. This argument usually rests less on the article's results and more on the discussion of these results. I am not surprised that authors spin the results in their discussion sections.
As a side note, most readers only read the introduction and discussion section of a paper. Those two sections usually have the most spin as they are written to "hook" readers in the paper (and to an extent, to be accessible to a non-technical person sometimes outside of the field). Lit review, methods, and results sections are usually more dry as they report on the technical aspects of a research project.
Re: Spin found in clinical trial abstracts in top psychology and psychiatry journals
#9They're called soft sciences for a reason, they're more about interpretation and opinion than hard irrefutable evidence. So this is not surprising, it's probably quite a bit higher than 50% too, and in all of the soft science fields where agendas or political motives may be present; sociology, psychology, political science, some archaeology, etc
Rubbish.
The papers analyzed here are reporting the outcomes of randomized controlled trials. Political motivations, opinions, and interpretations have nothing to do with any of these papers' results.
A fair number of HN commentators have this bizarre caricature of psychology as someone lying on the couch, chattering about feelings while a tweed-jacketed man scribbles away. However, it hasn't been 1920 for a long time and the field has grown up and moved on. It's an actual science, with experiments and quantitative analysis\* and all that. The problems it tackles are really hard, in some ways evenmoreso than physics: you can generate an endless stream of identical electrons, but every human is different and has their own motivations.
\* Yes, yes, replication crisis, fMRI salmon of doubt. It's serious but psychology should get some credit for a) identifying it in the first place and b) fixing it. These problems certainly aren't confined to psych--it's mostly that psych experiments are easier to replicate.
Re: Spin found in clinical trial abstracts in top psychology and psychiatry journals
#10They're called soft sciences for a reason, they're more about interpretation and opinion than hard irrefutable evidence. So this is not surprising, it's probably quite a bit higher than 50% too, and in all of the soft science fields where agendas or political motives may be present; sociology, psychology, political science, some archaeology, etc
If you can't follow the scientific method most of the time, should their work be considered science at all?
Are you actually arguing that randomized controlled trials aren't following the scientific method?