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More Fake Journals From Elsevier
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sat May 09, 2009 11:16 AM
from the at-least-they're-consistent dept.
from the at-least-they're-consistent dept.
daemonburrito writes "Last week, we learned about Elsevier publishing a bogus journal for Merck. Now, several librarians say that they have uncovered an entire imprint of 'advertorial' publications. Excerpta Medica, a 'strategic medical communications agency,' is an Elsevier division. Along with the now infamous Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, it published a number of other 'journals.' Elsevier CEO Michael Hansen now admits that at least six fake journals were published for pharmaceutical companies."
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Merck Created Phony Peer-Review Medical Journal 213 comments
Hugh Pickens writes "Don't believe everything you read on the internet is a good rule to follow, but it turns out that you can't even believe a 'peer reviewed scientific journal' as details emerge that drug manufacturer Merck created a phony, but real sounding, peer-review journal titled the 'Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine' to publish data favorable to its products. 'What's sad is that I'm sure many a primary care physician was given literature from Merck that said, "As published in Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, Fosamax outperforms all other medications...."' writes Summer Johnson in a post on the website of the American Journal of Bioethics. One Australian rheumatologist named Peter Brooks who served as an 'honorary advisory board' to the journal didn't receive a single paper for peer-review in his entire time on the board, but it didn't bother him because he apparently knew the journal did not receive original submissions of research. All this is probably not too surprising in light of Merck's difficulties with Vioxx, the once $2.5 billion a year drug that was pulled from the market in September 2004, after a study showed it doubled the risk of heart attack and stroke in long-term users resulting in payments by Merck of $4.85 billion to settle personal injury claims from former users, but it bears repeating that 'if physicians would not lend their names or pens to these efforts, and publishers would not offer their presses, these publications could not exist.'"
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Not true. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not true. (Score:4, Funny)
Not anymore!
Parent
Re:Not true. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmmm... "Funny" isn't what I would have modded...
But this will in a few blows make all reviews related to the companies involved basically invalid.
And it will also cast a dark shadow over a lot of other reviews in other medical magazines.
I would recommend editors to remove all reviews currently for Merck products as well as all reviews provided by "Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine", "Excerpta Medica" and "Elsevier" just to be on the safe side until the sources of every review from those sources can be verified. And other reviews would have to be deeply scrutinized before added too.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
According to their wikipeia entry, they are entirely legit.
True! And it's also interesting to note that according to its own entry, Wikipedia is also legit.
Re:Google (Score:4, Informative)
I often see google search results linking to elsevier (or other journal) pages, with relevant keywords and text in them, however if you click on the link you get a page that doesn't have the same info.
That depends on the network you're requesting those pages from. When I'm using my university's VPN, I often actually get the documents that the search result page promises, because my university has a subscription.
Elsevier is probably doing the same for Google's IP addresses, and maybe Google even pays for it.
Parent
Re:Google (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
And... (Score:2, Insightful)
... not a damn thing will become of it because everyone who can do anything about it is in Merck's pocket.
Wrong (Score:4, Informative)
Also, anything that brings the sickening relationship between doctors and pharmaceutical companies to light is a good thing. Many times, doctors will prescribe the latest (expensive) drug to a patient when a generic does the job just as well precisely because the pharmaceutical companies bombard them with this kind of semi-false information. People need to be aware of this.
Parent
Packaging a chilling effect on hot topics (Score:5, Insightful)
No. At the very least, this gives schools a bargaining chip when negotiating journal packages with Elsevier....
There are few institutions which can or do afford all packages. Intead, they must choose one or the other. Like with the cable channels, the publishers aren't about to put all the "good" journals in one set and all the crap "journals" and advertisements in another.
Some journals and, thus, packages become must-have. And journals in the other packages become sidelined. And, because journals specialize, you get the subsequent marginalization of various topics and even fields of research.
That's on top of the veto power big business has on reearch funding. Remeber the US government may apportion grants, but since much of the money is coming from private business, it gets to select only from a subset of acceptable recipients and topics. e.g. OpenBSD: secure systems for less than the price of a cruise missile...
Parent
Re:Wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Mazarin5, if you use Google to search for bronchitis and acid reflux, you will find pages that mention acid reflux as a possible cause for bronchitis. It's possible that the doc who treated you thought that your bronchitis was caused by GERD or stomach acid making its way up into your esophagus. He wasn't trying to give you random pills just to make the drug rep happy. There is a connection between acid reflux and bronchitis. I am not an expert on this topic so I encourage you to do your own research with Google.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:And... (Score:4, Interesting)
Before reading this article, I was neutral toward this company. I didn't really know much about them. But now I know they are not to be trusted. I will make my best effort to avoid using any of their drugs, and I will be wary if any doctor tries to prescribe a Merck drug to me. And more importantly, I will not own any of their stock. Just this week I was reviewing my stock portfolio to do some more dollar cost averaging into the market rebound. Merck is now purged from my portfolio, and I will keep an eye out for it in any index or mutual funds that I buy. They are now in the same list as Monsanto.
I will also pass this article along to my fiends and co-workers. Hopefully they too will take this into consideration before buying their stock.
The justification for not owning their stock is not just moral. It is an economic concern as well. If a company behaves this recklessly, it puts itself at economic risk, as already demonstrated by it's multi-billion dollar Vioxx recall.
All major corporations are engaged in morally dubious behavior of one kind or another. But when it becomes this excessive and blatant, I have to draw a line.
Parent
Bad Feeling (Score:2)
I have a bad feeling that, as people start poking around, even more stories like this are going to be uncovered. Sure, Elsevier is admitting to six fake journals. What's the over/under for it being 20?
Now, I wonder if Merck makes a drug to get rid of bad feelings like this. I'll have to check an Elsevier journal to find out.
Re:Bad Feeling (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Bad Feeling (Score:4, Interesting)
I have a bad feeling that, as people start poking around, even more stories like this are going to be uncovered. Sure, Elsevier is admitting to six fake journals. What's the over/under for it being 20?
Now, I wonder if Merck makes a drug to get rid of bad feelings like this. I'll have to check an Elsevier journal to find out.
I'm not a doctor or any sort of medical practitioner. So, the following is just my personal opinion.
The pharmaceutical industry is one of the most corrupt industries in existence today. I actually find pharmacology quite interesting, especially the idea that physical chemicals can impact the nonphysical/intangible mind. Seeing the way this industry operates made me decide some time ago that I can't in any good conscience join up with them, fascinating though the subject may be.
There is one simple principle here: pharmaceutical companies cannot make any profit from healthy people. That's why you have so many "designer diseases" like Restless Leg Syndrome. Just think about how many people you know who do not regularly take some sort of prescription medication; they are becoming a minority. No one really questions this. No one with any sort of media presence is asking whether the fact that the general population is getting sicker and not healthier indicates that our medical system is fundamentally broken. Of course, you don't have to be much of a thinking man to realize that the media is not your friend, otherwise they'd ask questions like this and would go wherever the facts lead them, monied interests be damned.
I was in my doctor's office once and I asked his staff a question. I asked her why it is that pharmaceutical companies advertise prescription-only medicines to the general public, since after all you are supposed to ask your doctor what is wrong and have that doctor determine what medicine you need. There's little room in that process for brand recognition on the part of the patient. She flat-out told me "because the pharmaceutical companies RUN this entire industry". I salute the honesty of her answer. I was half expecting some sort of "party line" on that one.
Parent
Re:Bad Feeling (Score:5, Insightful)
The pharmaceutical industry is one of the most corrupt industries in existence today. I actually find pharmacology quite interesting, especially the idea that physical chemicals can impact the nonphysical/intangible mind.
Nonphysical intangible mind?
Neurochemicals, man. Read about them. Any intro to psych course includes education on what a few of the major neurochemicals do and their role in defining who "you" are.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The pharmaceutical industry is one of the most corrupt industries in existence today. I actually find pharmacology quite interesting, especially the idea that physical chemicals can impact the nonphysical/intangible mind.
Nonphysical intangible mind?
Neurochemicals, man. Read about them. Any intro to psych course includes education on what a few of the major neurochemicals do and their role in defining who "you" are.
Why do people insist on giving me the most simplistic of answers, always with the assumption that I never once came across them in any research on the subject? I'm not trying to complain so much as to point out that it's not necessary.
To say that "the entire mystery is completely rendered moot by the concept of neurochemicals!" is the same thing as saying "I am a materialist." If you are so inclined, and if you find that satisfying, then good for you. Not everyone subscribes to the materialist worldvi
Brain drugs. (Score:4, Insightful)
I equate the working of drugs for the brain much like our current understanding of gravity.
We know it works. We can reproduce it in exacting detail. We can model other experiments based upon our expectations of the way it works. But when we get down to the tiny details and questions... we have no idea exactly HOW it works.
The modern brain chemical industry is this way. Sure we know it is hitting up the "5HT" receptors but as to why that actually causes some effects in some and differing effects in others... well... uh... yeah.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That's a very interesting parallel. It also comes from the materialist perspective. What we get for it is a theory of gravitation that is irreconcilable with quantum mechanics. That alone should tell us that we are missing something fundamental and need to question all of our assumptions, all of the things that we "know to be impossible." Quantum mechanics itself tends to disregard cause-and-effect. An unstable
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Look, this is the News for Nerds site. You're looking for the News for Mystics site. Perhaps Google can help you find it.
Re:Brain drugs. (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're trying to contrast this against history it's simply wrong. Of course most advancement is, always has been and always will be in engineering rather than in the fundamentals - but the rate at which fundamental physics has developed has been nothing short of astonishing by historical standards.
In my personal (unqualified) opinion, the medical industry has its own version of this. We're getting better and better at modifying the system, at obtaining desired results by the introduction of chemicals, without increasing our understanding of what disease actually is, how it originates, and how it can be prevented.
Again, yes, the "engineering" approach of trying a known chemical and seeing what it does advances much faster than the theory - but that's not to say the fundamental work has stagnated. We genuinely do know a lot more about disease than we used to.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in psychiatry.
In more ways than one. While the state of fundamental understanding in psychiatry is particularly poor, we have seen a lot of genuine progress.
My evidence for this is very simple: if we understood these things, we should have a population that is getting healthier. Instead, we have a population that increasingly depends on medications because it is becoming sicker.
And where's your evidence for that? Life expectancy is continuing to rise (we're expecting a "fast food bump", but that's hardly the fault of medicine, and I don't believe it's happened yet), and the fact that a condition is being treated doesn't mean it didn't exist before - e.g. PTSD is often described as a modern invention, but if one looks at contemporary descriptions of WWII soldiers, one can see a lot of very similar symptoms - they simply didn't get treated. It's hard to appreciate how much better our general quality of life is than that of even 50 years ago, because we adjust to what we're used to.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You remind me of the three stages of technology:
Not a bad description. :-)
Personally, I suspect that the reductionist worldview is at least partially responsible for that.
Holistic, reductionist, it's all abstraction.
We're human, with human limitations. To understand we have to abstract and that by definition is an approximation. Some people aren't happy with current abstractions/approximations but unfortunately they have
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You don't have to be afraid. Just come out and say it: "I do believe in god"
The problem with that is you then have to explain what "God" means to you. My personal concept of that is quite unlike many of the more mainstream interpretations, though (perhaps because I have studied most major religions) it will sound very much like some of them. That makes this a thorny issue that is likely to create much confusion. Really, I was content with showing the limitations of the materialist worldview and I would greatly prefer that each individual works out for themselves whether they bel
Re:Bad Feeling (Score:5, Insightful)
I have been diagnosed with that "designer disease", you dickwad. How did the doctor determine that I have Restless Leg Syndrome (RLS)? I have had two sleep studies at a local hospital. During the studies, dozens of electrodes connected to my body monitored everything from my brain waves to the movement of my calf muscles. The summary reports from the sleep studies show that I shift between different stages of sleep much more frequently than "normal" people. While reviewing the results of the first sleep study with me, the doctor pointed to a section of the sleep stage vs. time graph and said that I moved my legs 66 times per hour and awoke 22 times per hour. I don't get restful sleep like "normal" people because my legs move while I am asleep. The sleep doc that I was working with did not fabricate those results just to sell me more Requip or Mirapex.
Please stick your "designer disease" comment for RLS up your ass.
Thank you,
-Scott
Parent
"restless leg syndrome" is quite real (Score:5, Insightful)
Try to find incidents of Restless Leg Syndrome (by that name or any other) prior to the advertising campaign. See for yourself how difficult that is. Then you will see that it's not some malady that has plagued mankind over the years for which we finally have a treatment.
Having slept with someone who was tormented by this for months, I can assure you that it is quite real, whatever it is. It's possible that it was much rarer (or nonexistent) prior to 1900, but that's hardly proof that it doesn't exist now.
Your argument was going okay until you introduced this howler...
Parent
Re:Bad Feeling (Score:4, Insightful)
You're confusing two different discussions.
The first is that the number of diagnosed and treated cases of RLS has gone up significantly since advertising campaigns began. The other is that RLS is diagnosed when it shouldn't be.
It's quite possible that RLS was historically written off as blanket "sleeplessness" before. Now we're able to identify and treat it. This would be the result of a completely normal and legitimate evolution in our ability to practice medicine, not necessarily the result of us fabricating some "designer disease". Otherwise, at one time you could make identical arguments about any common affliction, claiming it's really just bad spirits, not some made-up disease.
It's ALSO quite possible that too many people are diagnosed with RLS that don't have it. Or not. The important part is that they're two different statements, and that difference is whether or not you can infer a massive conspiracy.
Parent
Re:Bad Feeling (Score:5, Informative)
You are right. It's nearly impossible. For instance,
1) Open browser to wikipedia.
2) Search for RLS
3) Scan down to the History section
"Earlier studies were done by Thomas Willis (1622â"1675) and by Theodor Wittmaack.[54] Another early description of the disease and its symptoms were made by George Miller Beard (1839-1883).[54] In a 1945 publication titled 'Restless Legs', Swedish neurologist Karl-Axel Ekbom (1907-1977)[54] described the disease and presented eight cases used for his studies.[55]"
So you are absolutely correct, provided, of course, that you can show us that the advertising campaign for RLS began in the early 1600s or earlier.
Parent
Re:Bad Feeling (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Bad Feeling (Score:5, Funny)
You also seem to suffer from Restless Mouth Syndrome (RMS). I suggest yo try some BSD.
Parent
Re:Bad Feeling (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, I do have a reason: You posted a message on
>for if you do that, the suffering is yours and does not affect me in the slightest.
Do you do this passive-aggressive shit all the time? It's slightly annoying.
>I'll give you some friendly advice.
Free advice is often worth exactly what you pay for it...
>calmly explain to that person why you believe they are misinformed. You may even convince them.
I don't want to convince you that you are wrong. You are a nutcase and you are spreading mis-information that may have a negative effect on someone else's health. I suppose you are also anti-vaccination because the guvmint uses the annual flu vaccines for mind control.
>What you're doing here, however, has no chance of working.
And, once again, you are presenting your opinion. Personally, I think you are a douchebag and I don't care what you think will or will not work. My only concern is that your comments will harm someone else who reads them.
Parent
Re:Bad Feeling (Score:5, Interesting)
There is one simple principle here: pharmaceutical companies cannot make any profit from healthy people.
They also can't make any profit off the majority of sick people in the world, either, because those people have no money. That's how you get situations like this:
We found that, of 1393 new chemical entities marketed between 1975 and 1999, only 16 were for tropical diseases and tuberculosis. (Trouiller et al., "Drug Development for Neglected Diseases: a Deficient Market and a Public-Health Policy Failure." The Lancet 359, no. 9324 (June 22, 2002): 2188-2194.
(Ironically, I got that through ScienceDirect). Yet while the pharma giants won't focus R&D on neglected diseases, they'll also lobby against any attempts to set up alternative incentive systems designed to stimulate research into those disease... probably too afraid that the alternatives will be more successful than the current patent system, and people will start to wonder why more drugs can't be developed that way.
Parent
More reason to ditch publishers (Score:5, Interesting)
Interesting. This militates against the argument that the "imprimatur" of a publisher always adds to a journal's legitimacy, and is one more reason to ditch money-grubbing publishers for open-access journals.
That is really a huge blow to the reputation of Elsevier... of course they publish hundreds (thousands?) of journals, so in absolute terms maybe it is not that big a deal, but still...
Re:More reason to ditch publishers (Score:5, Insightful)
I think I've heard it said this way: "It doesn't take much arsenic to poison a well."
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Only takes one mistake to have your reputation decimated.
Re:More reason to ditch publishers (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is not that you lied to me. The problem is that I can no longer trust you.
Parent
Re:More reason to ditch publishers (Score:5, Insightful)
This militates against the argument that the "imprimatur" of a publisher always adds to a journal's legitimacy.
It sure does. Especially since Elseiver has explicitly made that argument. Here's an official Elsevier position paper on open access [elsevier.com]: "By introducing an author-pays model, Open Access risks undermining public trust in the integrity and quality of scientific publications that has been established over hundreds of years. The subscription model, where the users pay ... ensures high quality, independent peer review and prevents commercial interests from influencing decisions to publish. This critical control measure would be rmeoved in a system where the author - or indeed his/her sponsoring institution - pays."
That gives the open access movement a big boost. [earlham.edu].
Parent
Re:More reason to ditch publishers (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely right. Even though Elsevier is huge and a fixture in scientific research, this is the kind of ethical breach that could lead to ruin for the company. As big as they are, the NIH is bigger and there are people there who do not appreciate these kinds of shenanigans. It is absolutely an argument for community based open-access journals. All that would have to happen is the NIH putting publication in such journals as a condition in their grants and librarians the world over would rejoice.
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Can this be considered fraud? (Score:5, Interesting)
The journals seem to be intended to mislead the reader into believing that research and reporting has been done which has not. Does that not constitute fraud? Would there not be an option to have the publisher and the pharmacorp charged with fraud?
Re:Can this be considered fraud? (Score:4, Interesting)
"The journals seem to be intended to mislead the reader into believing that research and reporting has been done which has not."
But what if the research WAS done? Does the data/research meet the industry standards? As far as I can tell, it was. So there is no fraud
How is this different from any other journal that arbitrarily decides what articles to publish?
The whole point of medical research is to influence doctors.
Parent
Re:Can this be considered fraud? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you have a large corporation, you have a set of corporate policies in force. Some of which should prohibit fraud, conflicts of interest, and other assorted bad behavior. If it can be shown that the corporation enforces these policies and takes appropriate steps to correct and/or punish employees that violate them, then the corporation should not be held liable for their misbehavior.
On the other hand, corporations need to be held to a higher standard than individuals in the areas of regulatory compliance. I've seen cases where violations were reduced from felonies to civil violations because the company claimed that it was 'unaware' of the actions of its employees. And yet, those employees were not punished because they were 'unaware' of the applicable law. Civil penalties were assessed and corrective actions undertaken. And then they did it again. If a company can't enforce its policies, it should have its corporate charter revoked.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Too big to jail? Corporation size could use some downward pressure.
Depends, and what I said doesn't just apply to the likes of an IBM or a General Motors.
... should he be imprisoned for that one employee's misdeeds?
Suppose you have a company of fifty people, and one of them does something illegal without the knowledge of the owner. Should the guy that built that business from the ground up, busted his ass for ten years, took out a second mortgage in order to meet payroll when times were tough
I'm not arguing against accountability for upper management, but like most
Re:Can this be considered fraud? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
How I found out about it... (with Simpsons ref) (Score:2)
I was watching a panel discussion/documentary show called "Amazing Discoveries!". They were talking about great properties of the "Powersauce bar" ("A bushel of apples packed in every bar, plus a secret ingredient that unleashes the awesome power of apples!)" and the dangers of the "Vita-Peach Health Block".
But seriously, I don't see why this is so surprising. Infomercials have been around forever, masquerading as talk shows, documentaries, etc. This is just a print equivalent. I certa
Charge them with fraud (Score:3, Insightful)
This is MAJOR fraud in the medical/pharmaceutical industry. Merck and Elsevier need to be shut completely down for this bullshit.
Or, alternatively, start killing off Merck and Elsevier CEOs, NOW. Send the message that we will not tolerate this misleading information.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This is MAJOR fraud in the medical/pharmaceutical industry. Merck and Elsevier need to be shut completely down for this bullshit.
Or, alternatively, start killing off Merck and Elsevier CEOs, NOW. Send the message that we will not tolerate this misleading information.
Well, that's probably a bit extreme, but it's certainly true that lies of this magnitude can result in people being hurt or killed. This isn't a joke.
I worked for them... (Score:3, Interesting)
Poisoning The Well (Score:3, Insightful)
Everyone who has conducted legitimate science, or expanded their medical knowledge, based on reading and/or referencing the fake journals, has been disserviced. The false information has been passed along and may continue since not all readers/users could ever be located. Science and medicine have been poisoned by this, and the damage can multiply. The publisher should print a final edition of each, containing only one article, saying that all previous work printed there is suspect at best. The problem could be somewhat mitigated if the editors of every other journal reviewed the articles they've printed to see if they contain references to those journals, and request the author(s) examine them for possible revision removing same. When the authors are no longer reachable the editors should do it.
As somebody... (Score:4, Interesting)
who has published something in an Elsevier Journal (they publish a lot of conference series), i am personnaly disappointed. I wonder if it is possible to retract that article and republish it somewhere else.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Skeptics have throwing out a variety of reasons that open-access journals like PLoS will never work. One of those reasons is that traditional print journals have a lot of prestige, just based on their centuries of momentum. Scientists won't want to publish in upstart open-access journals, according to this argument, because nobody will take their publications seriously. Well, this scandal would seem to show that you can't trust a journal just because it comes from a centuries-old publishing house.
In my experience, the prestige is based on journal titles, not publisher. No one respects publications because they're carried by elsevier, they respect them because of the journal title. Not sure if nature is elsevier, but if it came out that 90% of elsevier's publications were fraud like this, researchers would still reguard Nature highly and want to publish in it.
So no, this doesn't elevate open-access journals because it doesn't knock down the established journals.
Science is like an Easter egg hunt where there are too many kids and not enough eggs. Everybody is trying to pad their c.v. with as many papers as possible, in order to land one of those prized research jobs. Because of this, there's been a huge proliferation of small, specialized, low-quality, expensive journals, and that's been creating a lot of problems for librarians.
Well, I feel a little sorry for those