Ah, but if they had not found spin we would never have heard of their study...
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
#12The 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 a…
huh? we read the methods and results first, then the spin (exception, the abstracts)
Re: Spin found in clinical trial abstracts in top psychology and psychiatry journals
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Clinical trials are not true repeatable, scientific experiments. They're really just controlled studies which are the best that can be done in the absence of the possibility of a controlled experiment. In psychology, this however is just the tip of an iceberg of problems with such research being unscientific.
Re: Spin found in clinical trial abstracts in top psychology and psychiatry journals
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you actually arguing that randomized controlled trials aren't following the scientific method?
Clinical trials are not true repeatable, scientific experiments. They're really just controlled studies which are the best that can be done in the absence of the possibility of a controlled experiment. In psychology, this however is just the tip of an iceberg of problems with such research being unscientific.
I don't follow.
An experiment needs to be repeatable in principle. You don't actually have to re-run it with the exact same specimens or subjects; they can be sampled from some larger population that you're studying (e.g., patients with depression). Nevertheless, you can often do something like a cross-over design that lets you repeatedly test the same patients in different conditions.
Re: Spin found in clinical trial abstracts in top psychology and psychiatry journals
#15Abstracts are typically between 150 and 250 words, yet studies, especially clinical trials, are frequently complex affairs. Fitting nuance into an abstract is just often not possible, and frankly, the clearest most succinct language usually oversells the results.
Re: Spin found in clinical trial abstracts in top psychology and psychiatry journals
#16The 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 a…
huh? we read the methods and results first, then the spin (exception, the abstracts)
Several major journals, including nature, put the methods at the end.
Re: Spin found in clinical trial abstracts in top psychology and psychiatry journals
#17Re: Spin found in clinical trial abstracts in top psychology and psychiatry journals
#18I 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 us…
I'm a novice in my IT career. If you're able and willing, would you mind explaining to me how software (spun as it may be) for disaster relief, could be used for data collection outside the scope of the objectives you had in the name of disaster relief? If this question misses the mark you're welcome to ignore it. Thanks!
Re: Spin found in clinical trial abstracts in top psychology and psychiatry journals
#19I 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 us…
I'm a novice in my IT career. If you're able and willing, would you mind explaining to me how software (spun as it may be) for disaster relief, could be used for data collection outside the scope of the objectives you had in the name of disaster relief? If this question misses the mark you're welcome to ignore it. Thanks!
It's probably image analysis from overflight, if I were to guess, or an ML-augmented database.
Re: Spin found in clinical trial abstracts in top psychology and psychiatry journals
#20They'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 tim…
Have you ever talked to people in the social sciences ? There very much is political motivations, opinions and interpretations. And don't forget careers. Many people have built decade-long careers on being the go-to person (or even department, it can be a dozen careers) for specific treatments. Look up what EMDR is, for a particularly ludicrous example, and read the career of Francine Shapiro. Note that she had decades in which she had a great position to collect support and evidence for her therapy, as a professor, director of a treatment center and practicing clinician ... and somehow she never did (mind if I make the assumption that she did in fact collect plenty of data, it just said what all psychiatric studies say about all treatments)
Psychoanalysis or "someone lying on the couch, chattering about feelings while a tweed-jacketed man scribbles away" was done until deep in the 80s, where it was canceled because of the famous observation that it was exactly as effective as giving patients a free membership card to a sport club (not even checking if they used it at all: so some patients wouldn't have).
But truth is that it was not just done because psychoanalysis wasn't effective. It in fact psychoanalysis is definitely the most effective treatment in psychiatry. It was done so attention from expensive psychiatrists could be removed entirely from patients, as a cost-saving measure. Now all psychiatrists do is draw out treatment plans, to be executed by people with much less training than they have. Now a patient in mental health treatment is lucky to see a psychiatrist once a month.
All these treatments found are known to be far less effective than psychoanalysis. Psychiatry as a whole is simply a fraud. There isn't a single known treatment against depression, other than fixing the problem that causes the depression (which is external to the patient, and never has anything to do with psychiatry)
For the same story with added drama, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment