Healthy Skepticism Library item: 16439
Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.
Publication type: Journal Article
Collier R
Medical journal or marketing device?
CMAJ 2009 Sep 1; 181:(5):
http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/181/5/E83
Abstract:
There are thousands of medical journals published worldwide, and it seems busy doctors and academics sometimes have trouble determining which ones are worth reading, which ones are worth skimming and which ones shouldn’t even have the word “journal” in their titles. Of course, there are professionals with a skillset particularly suited to helping users of medical journals separate the roses from the ragweed: research librarians.
After news broke in April that academic publishing giant Elsevier published an industry-funded fake journal in Australia (The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine), research librarians flocked to the Internet to discuss the topic of publications designed to trick “average readers” into believing they are legitimate, peer-reviewed medical journals. “This makes me think, a librarian, especially a medical librarian, should not be an ‘average reader’, not even if ‘average’ means ‘MD’,” Jonathan Rochkind, a systems librarian, wrote on his blog Bibliographic Wilderness, adding that research librarians ought to be experts in “evaluating credibility, authenticity, and authority of apparently scholarly literature.”
“It is part of our job to help people look at information and determine if it’s credible or not,” says Lee-Anne Ufholz, a health sciences research liaison at the University of Ottawa.
Although research librarians aren’t experts in medical content, they are experts in finding information and assessing the many markers that help indicate the level of quality of scientific literature. These markers include where the journal is indexed, which libraries hold it and how often it is cited in other journals.
“If the paper trail is weak, maybe the evidence you expect to glean from the article is also weak, so you should look at it very critically,” says Dean Giustini, a biomedical librarian at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
