Friday, September 14, 2012

A must read for those interested in "Spin" of science by press releases & in papers

A new paper in PLoS Medicine is of great interest to me: PLOS Medicine: Misrepresentation of Randomized Controlled Trials in Press Releases and News Coverage: A Cohort Study.  Bad press releases drive me crazy.  And it has been shown that press releases can frequently be a source of scientific misinformation in the press.  Interestingly this paper concludes that spin in the papers themselves is correlated to spin in press releases ... So in other words, the scientists are partly to blame ... Not shocking but interesting ...

1 comment:

  1. Goes well with this PLoS-1 paper:
    "Why Most Biomedical Findings Echoed by Newspapers Turn Out to be False: The Case of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder" http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0044275

    "Because newspapers preferentially echo initial ADHD findings appearing in prominent journals, they report on uncertain findings that are often refuted or attenuated by subsequent studies. If this media reporting bias generalizes to health sciences, it represents a major cause of distortion in health science communication."

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