A new initiative by The Watchdogs Behind Retraction Watch aims to investigate defective or false medical sciences for almost $ 1 million.
It Scientific Integrity Center He has just launched the medical evidence project, a two-year effort to identify medical research published with a negative effect on health guidelines and to make sure people really listen to it.
Equipped with a $ 900,000 grant from Open Philanthropy and a main team of up to five researchers, the project will use Forensa Metience tools to identify problems in scientific articles and report their findings through the retraction clock, the main place for scientific surveillance.
“Originally we established the Center for Scientific Integrity as a Home for the Retraction Clock, but we always hoped that we could do more in the space of responsibility for the research,” said Ivan Oransky, Center’s executive director and co -founder of Retraction Watch, in a position announcing the grant. “The medical evidence project allows us to support critical analysis and spread the findings.”
According to NatureThese defective and counterfeit documents are annoying because they move metanalysis: reviews that combine multiple studies finding to draw more statistically robust conclusions. If one or two bunk beds become a meta -analysis, they can be inclined to the scale of health policy.
In 2009, to name One Case, a European guideline recommended the use of beta-blockers during non-cardiac surgery, based on millennium turn investigations that later became doubtful. Years later, an independent review suggested that the orientation could have contributed to 10,000 deaths a year in the United Kingdom.
Directed by James Heathers, a scientific integrity consultant, the team’s plan is to create software tools, pursue the advantages of anonymous complainants, and pay for Companys reviewers to check their work. They aim to identify at least 10 defective metaanalysis per year.
The team is choosing its time wisely. As Gizmodo previously reported, Brossa science generated by Ai It floods the academic digital ecosystem, which appears in everything, from conference procedures to equally reviewed magazines. A study published in the uninformed review of Harvard Kennedy School found that two thirds of the recovered sampled papers on Google Scholar contained GPT -generated text signs, even at main scientific outlets. About 14.5% of fake studies focused on health.
This is especially alarming because Google Scholar does not distinguish between equals and preprested studies, students’ papers or other less rigorous work. And, once this type of capture becomes metaanalysis or quoted by doctors, it is difficult to undo the consequences. “If we cannot trust that the research we read is genuine,” a researcher said in Gizmodo, “we risk making decisions based on incorrect information.”
We have already seen how nonsense can be diminished. In 2021, Springer Nature retired more than 40 Papers in his Arabic Geoscience Magazine, so incoherent studies they read as Ai-Generated Mad Libs. Last year, publisher’s borders had to throw a role with images generated by Ai impossible anatomically Rate genitals.
We entered the age of digital fossil preserve and propagate Phrases of nonsense as if they were real scientific terms. For example, at the beginning of the year, a group of researchers found a set of worn words from a 1959 biology document embedded in the outputs of great language models, including the Openai GPT-4o.
In this climate, the purpose of the medical evidence project is more like choosing than in cleaning. The team deals with a delugon of defective information, hides in sight and many of which can have very real health consequences if they are taken in nominal value.
