Scientific "Journals"

In an interesting recent development, it looks like Elsevier has bee publishing a couple medical journals that were "advertorial" publications. There is a great discussion about this over at Slashdot, and an article from The Guardian includes this bit:

This time Elsevier Australia went the whole hog, giving Merck an entire publication which resembled an academic journal, although in fact it only contained reprinted articles, or summaries, of other articles. In issue 2, for example, nine of the 29 articles concerned Vioxx, and a dozen of the remainder were about another Merck drug, Fosamax. All of these articles presented positive conclusions. Some were bizarre: such as a review article containing just two references.

This adds quite a new and different element to the challenge of evaluating the quality of research, particularly when it comes to teaching students how to evaluate the quality of different publications. As an example, I don't have quite the same anti-Wikipedia stance as some academics that I know, but I also make it clear to students that Wikipedia can be a great place to start reading about a new topic - but the most valuable aspect of Wikipedia are the links to relevant references at the end of an article. Suggesting that peer-reviewed research is the gold standard against which other publications should be measured becomes slightly murkier when something like this hits the mainstream media.

I guess that's what I find to be most troubling about this entire story... Is it bad that Elsevier did this? Of course. Will it impact how people look at all Elsevier publications? I'd assume so. But what does it do the credibility of peer-reviewed academic journals more generally? We'll see where it goes...

(Unrelated to this post, it feels REALLY good to be back after surviving the NIH Challenge Grant process. Hopefully I'll have good news to post here in a few months!)