News from selected sessions of the International Congress of Biomedical Peer Review for Friday, September 19:
"Glass ceiling" at some medical journals, and other questions of bias
Are peer reviewers biased against unconventional medicine?
"Mad-cow" affair suggests journals should provide information more quickly in cases of major health risks
"Glass ceiling" at some medical journals, and other questions of bias
Prague, Sept. 19 – Despite recent gains, women remain underrepresented in the ranks of editors of peer-reviewed medical journals compared with the numbers of female reviewers and authors, suggested a study presented today at the International Congress on Biomedical Peer Review and Global Communications.
The proportion of women editors at four American epidemiology journals in the study increased from 6.5 to 16 percent from 1982 to 1994. But the study's authors found that "the proportion of editors who were women in 1994 is still considerably lower than the proportion of women who were authors in 1982." They concluded that factors other than the size of the pool of qualified female editorial candidates need to be considered to explain the pattern of selection for editorial positions, including the possibility of gender bias.
Another study presented today refuted allegations of publication bias against research results favorable to the tobacco industry. The researchers from the University of California, San Francisco found no correlation between the nature of data on the health effects of passive smoking and whether those data were published. In telephone interviews with 65 principal ingestigators, ongoing data collection and analysis was cited most often as the reason for not publishing data.
In additional presentations today:
- A study examined unpublished data cited in drug advertisements in British magazines geared to general practitioners and found that the documentation provided by the drug companies "is often of low quality. Many claims thus seem inadequadely supported."
- A study on publication bias indicated that objective differences in emergency medicine research, as determined by two blinded reviewers, did not adequately explain why the research was or was not published. The authors suggest that having an abstract rejected at a scientific meeting "may discourage manuscript preparation and submission to journals."
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Are peer reviewers biased against unconventional medicine?
Prague, Sept. 19 – Two studies presented today at the International Congress on Biomedical Peer Review and Global Communications showed mixed results as to whether peer reviewers are biased against unconventional medicine.
In the first study, the authors randomly showed 398 expert peer reviewers one of two versions of a fictional short report on obesity treatment. The reports were identical except for the nature of the intervention: an orthodox drug vs. a homeopathic remedy.
The reviewers were then asked to rate the report's importance on a scale of 1 to 5 ("trivial" to "major contribution") and on another scale with ratings from "reject outright" to " definitely accept." Reviewers were three times as likely to favor the orthodox version over the unconventional version of the report, leading the researchers to conclude that there seems to be a reviewer bias against papers dealing with unconventional medical concepts.
In the second study, the researchers again presented respondents with two versions of a fictional study, an in-vitro experiment on a mainstream drug or an identical second version concerning an unconventional yet commercially available drug. In this study, however, the researchers found no specific review bias against the unconventional medicine.
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"Mad-cow" affair suggests journals should provide information more quickly in cases of major health risks
Prague, Sept. 19 – By the time The Lancet published its April 1996 scientific article on a new variant of a fatal neurologic condition linked – with very little evidence – with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, media frenzy over the British outbreak of what is popularly known as "Mad Cow disease" had run for three weeks. It already had created a public panic, then mostly burned itself out.
Enrico Girardi, MD, of Italy's Centro di Riferimento AIDS e Servizio di Epidemiologia delle Malattie Infettive, and several colleagues described the phenomenon today in research presented to the International Congress on Biomedical Peer Review and Global Communications. When peer-reviewed research is published after word of a health risk becomes public, they concluded, its impact on the popular media is small.
The authors analyzed reports in leading Italian newspapers about the new variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or CJD, that had been reported to be associated with "Mad Cow disease." Out of 535 articles collected in the seven weeks after March 26, when the British Secretary of State for Health announced that the new form of CJD had been identified in 10 people, 72 percent had been published before publication of the scientific article in The Lancet.
The researchers recommended that the peer-review process move quickly when faced with a serious public health risk to give health decision-makers and the public scientifically sound, timely information. They also suggested that when stories are relevant to public health, peer-reviewed journals should disseminate all scientific information as early as possible – for example, on the Internet – so that scientists and public health officials worldwide can have full access to it.
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