A relative of mine was in the late-stages of cancer, and was not able to find ANY trials willing to accept them. The worst of those trials was out of Baltimore (MD USA), and they ghosted my relative after initial in-person consults that required by relative to drive out of state. Despite the patient's repeated and dogged outreach to the trial authors after that point, there was never an explicit "no" that would let the patient move on, just radio silence instead and that felt cruel to me.
This also comes up with rankings of cancer centers. As the rankings get based on metrics that include things like survival, taking on the hard patients can have a negative impact on their rank. I've seen this cause internal debates on how to handle.
It's nowhere near my industry and I know virtually nothing about what really goes into these sorts of things, but seems like maybe whichever organization is doing the rankings should simply make that a negative metric. Like, a super negative metric.
True. A better way to say it would have been to say that when taking the blame carries professional or financial risk, the smart move is to avoid it. When everyone cooperates, everyone wins (until the system breaks down); if all but one cooperates, it gets pinned on a fall guy (to the same effect).
A loved one is moving through this pathway now. Its has you said: try all the established drugs first, even if they aren't directly indicated for the cancer diagnosis of the patient, then move on to the more modern and specific treatments once the established medicines have failed.
One problem with that approach is, once the patient has reached the point of several failed treatments, the cancer has possibly become advanced and the patient is worn down by the earlier interventions. In my observation, this confluence makes the newer medicines simultaneously harder for the patient to tolerate but also appear less effective than might've been the case at earlier stages of the disease.
No, that's the "homing system" side of this analogy. GP is talking about some sort of poison (chemo), but I don't know which one or what the paranoia is about.
Yeah there's stuff that will get you on lists especially since 9/11. But some of them have been restricted since before that, though de facto unenforceable. Today there is the ability to ingest huge volumes of data. I just don't want to deal with the pain in the ass even if I'm found innocent.
Because the amount of pencil-whipped "peer review" feedback I've received could fit in a shoe box, because many "reviewers" are looking for the CV credit for their role and not so much the actual effort of reviewing.
And there's no way to call them out on their laziness except maybe to not submit to their publication again and warn others against it too.
And, to defend their lack of review, all they need to say to the editor anyway is: "I didn't see it that way."
I never understood how peer reviewers are supposed to "validate" a paper and how they’re tacitly thought to be doing so by the general public. Authors make claims based on data reviewers don’t have direct access to, from experiments they obviously can’t supervise the execution. They’re forced to accept the claims at face value. In my experience (and I’ve been on both sides), it’s more about overall quality and impact. Journals don’t want badly written papers on unremarkable topics. It’s closer to being a harsh anonymous editor than a real safeguard of “science™.”
I would say peer review is guaranteed to have major problems either with researchers writing what their peers will approve and reviewers being afraid to diverge from the party lines.
Oh, yes. Repackaging and reframing of data - as mentioned in the OP article too - is a common practice for farming impact and article numbers too.
Why do novel research when you can just partner up with your friends, bring your data and combine with theirs for the umpteenth paper on the same thing, then wade into spamming down the submissions in every academic journal with impact in your field! If it published once in this journal, surely the 3rd recombination will too (and more often than not... it does.)
I'm a recovering academic, and have not published since not long after defending my dissertation.
I blame this behavior entirely on "publish or perish". The demands for novel, thoughtful and statistically-significant findings is tremendous in academe, and this is the result: cheating.
I left professional academia because I resented the grind, and the push to publish ANYTHING (even reframing and recombining the same data umpteen times in different publications) in an effort to earn grants or attain tenure.
The academia system is broken, and it cannot be repaired with minor edits, in my opinion. This is a tear out and do over scenario for the academic culture, I'm afraid.
