Category: Opinion

Since When is “Fast and Efficient” a Shortcoming?

This past winter, I was notified in a short email that a scientific journal directory intended to drop Cureus from its list of preferred Open Access journals. No matter how specious any claim to exclusivity might be, who doesn’t crave getting past the big burly doorman guarding “The Club”? I reached out to this burly “Editor-in-Chief” of a “fraternity of journals” asking him how and why he arrived at his decision. After six email requests over nearly five months, I finally received a terse three-sentence 72-word response. In the eyes of the “Editor-in-Chief”, Cureus’ primary shortcoming was “submission to publication times are extremely short and you advertise your speed.” Basically, as I interpret this email rejection, Cureus’ sin is that it’s just too damn fast and efficient. Ahh… yeah, I guess Cureus is guilty as charged.

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Wear a Damn Mask, PLEASE!

Wear a Damn Mask, PLEASE!

When Covid first appeared in the US, several Asian physician friends had simple advice for me, “Wear a mask.” Having dealt with various coronaviruses for over a decade, this was the fundamental lesson taken from dealing with and controlling these respiratory viruses. Now, I may only be a dumb neurosurgeon, (said with humility, irony and in jest), but I know a thing or two about masks, having spent 30 years of life wearing them, sometimes for 12 or more hours at a time. There is nothing pleasurable about wearing a mask, but I have experienced first-hand how masks can protect patients and physicians from illness. More broadly I have seen how masks can protect healthcare workers from the worst of infectious diseases, even giving them supernatural-like protection when they must enter the belly of the beast while caring for highly contagious and fatal illnesses like Ebola. Meanwhile, each and every day, healthcare workers all over the world, including my own family members are able to avoid infection while caring for hospitalized Covid patients who are often spewing the virus everywhere. It’s incontrovertible – masks truly work!; they prevent Covid infections.

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The Covid-19 Pandemic: Not a Surprise!

Right now it is impossible to ignore the financial markets panicking, the breathless coverage by news media, the fearful buying at Costcos everywhere, and so many friends and family now worried about the emerging Covid-19 pandemic. Predictions of what might come next raise the specter of an historic pandemic that could literally kill millions or dare I say tens of millions before it runs its course. We are clearly living in an “interesting” time.

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Does the Current Anti-science Crisis Emanate from our Imperious Scientific Journals?

In many domains of modern public discourse and opinion, there appears to have arisen willful ignorance of science, and perhaps even worse in many situations, outright hostility to scientific knowledge. This is most visible in government inaction towards a number of looming crises, most notably manmade global warming, but it’s also widely felt in the public health arena with vaccinations, drug addiction and over-utilization of antibiotics. Scientists and physicians remain frustrated and puzzled that obvious scientific arguments can be so baldly dismissed in the public arena, and in the face of such great collective peril. At the core of this modern tragic dilemma seems to lie a fundamental mistrust of science.

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A Handless Surgeon? It’s Not as Crazy as it Sounds.

During my halcyon college days, long before I knew I would “grow up” to be a surgeon, I was a huge fan of Star Trek. Although the ideas behind warp speed travel and teleportation were mind blowing, I was even more captivated by “Bones” McCoy’s Tricorder. This and other similarly nifty little medical devices could in the hands of the right doctor affect surgical-like cures for most any disease non-invasively and without pain.

Who wouldn’t want to embrace such a future for medicine?

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Hospital Rankings: Can Docs Make the Process Less Stupid?

It’s that time of the year. As Halloween decorations give way to Thanksgiving and now Christmas ornamentation, I, like many other American academic physicians, am sent an array of end-of-the-year email reminders from hospital and medical school leadership about sundry matters ranging from holiday parties to Press Ganey Scores. However none of these notifications stands out quite like being urged to update my membership with Doximity and thereby ensure my good standing with the social media network.

And what lofty academic or clinical function is being served? None other than the academic medical community’s best effort to get out the faculty vote for Doximity’s upcoming and all-important hospital and departmental yearly reputation scoring – a number which ultimately feeds into the even more important, annual hospital rankings among the US News and World Report.

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Fake Science: More Common Than You Think

Yet again the edifices of peer review were shaken by recent retractions in The New England Journal of Medicine and Cochrane Reviews. The article (and another “expression of concern publication”) retracted in the NEJM was authored by a Brigham and Women’s Hospital researcher (an institution of which I am a graduate), Dr. Piero Anversa, who has been implicated in the fraudulent publication of as many as 31 cardiac stem cell articles. Meanwhile, under seeming political pressures from a group of patient activists that decried an analysis entitled: “Exercise as treatment for patients with chronic fatigue syndrome,” deeming it a personal affront to their suffering, the editors of the prestigious Cochrane Reviews decided to withdraw it. The scientist who did the actual review for the journal lodged a bitter complaint about this “editorial” decision; it is hard to miss the irony here of Cochrane Reviews being a supposed impartial arbitrator of medical scientific quality that drives clinical decision-making. Fraudulent scientific results, politics trumping science, what is a reader to believe?

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Towards a Cureus Data Repository

*Co-authored by John R. Adler & Achim Schweikard

Most scientific articles come with some form of data. For Cureus, our data includes medical images, graphics, drawings and tables. Access to such data enables a reader to verify the content and credibility of an article while also better understanding it. Many types of data, provided they are findable via search, can have value to readers independent of the article with which it was originally connected; medical imagery and genetic sequencing information being cases in point. For example, with modern methods of machine learning requiring large data sets for training, journals are a logical repository for such information. Therefore a peer-reviewed article that provides access to data will oftentimes prove much more valuable than that same article without data. Especially for internet-based media with access to large amounts of digital storage space, data sharing between authors and readers would and should become a standard. As an example, instead of showing data for a single representative case in an article, which is typical for traditional journals, we could make data for all cases in this article available to readers. Readers could then download such enhanced data sets directly in electronic format.

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Is it Time to Start Publicly Shaming Plagiarists?

Publishing is a privilege, not a right. The vast majority of Open Access journals, such as PloS, Frontiers, BioMed Central, etc., charge authors several thousand dollars for this privilege. Part of the publisher’s service to the author (and ultimately readers) involves a plagiarism check, the cost of which is readily borne by the substantial Open Access fees paid by authors. Alternatively, authors are afforded a similar service when they surrender their copyright to subscription journals.

In Cureus’ free publication model plagiarism, and the cost of checking for plagiarism, represents a bigger challenge. Each and every article we publish must be checked for plagiarism. When we discover that content has been taken from other sources without proper attribution, the article is blocked and the academic department leadership of the offending institution is notified. This process costs our journal meaningful time and money.

Because plagiarism undermines Cureus’ philosophy of providing free Open Access publishing, we want to do everything in our power to deter and prevent plagiarists from submitting to Cureus. This is no easy task, but we believe it’s worth it. How might we do this? One idea is the use of old-fashioned public shaming. Perhaps if the offending authors are suitably exposed, these “authors” and/or institutions will clean up their act. After all, we at Cureus know who the plagiarists are and where they’re located. The question I would now like to pose to the community of Cureus users is, how far do you think we should go? Should we list plagiarists by name on a digital “Wall of Shame”?

While most of the institutions where plagiarists were situated have taken their responsibilities seriously when confronted, one such institution, located in Srinagar, India, recently refused to acknowledge the seriousness of their offense; what type of ethics is such an institution teaching its students and residents?. Regardless, in a first step to put a spotlight on plagiarists, the following world map illustrates the location of authors who have submitted articles with plagiarized content to Cureus in the past 2 years. We want to protect the integrity of our responsible authors, and you can help. I urge you, our Cureus users to sound off on this topic of concern for all of us!

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You Call it High Academic Standards, I Call it Racism

I’m not a big fan of identity politics, where, in my opinion, allegations of racism are too often used as a political cudgel to bludgeon an opponent. But sometimes it really is important to call out blatant racism, especially when there is a greater societal good at stake, such as in this case protecting the integrity of peer-reviewed science. I had this very “opportunity” thrown at me just last week.

To introduce our journal, and its unique crowd sourced quality score (SIQ) to new physician authors, Cureus utilizes email to reach specific communities of authors who have published articles in other Open Access journals, inviting them to promote the scoring of their articles via social media and email. While away on business in Beijing last week, I was surprised to see one email and two voicemails on my phone from a (unknown to me) senior and accomplished author in other journals. His messages quickly revealed a surprising anger over having his article promoted by Cureus. I replied with a brief email explaining how the Creative Commons copyright system supported such fair usage by Cureus, but this merely precipitated yet another profanity-laced email volley. Not wanting to inflame matters further, and even more so wanting to understand the true source of his angst, I decided to call the author. To say the call was unpleasant would be an understatement. I am a neurosurgeon and have fairly tough skin but it is never fun to have all kinds of profanity thrown at you, especially when you’re sure it is unjustified.

I let him vent a little, as my primary goal was figuring out why he was so upset. No matter how patiently I asked this guy to explain the source of his anger, he repeatedly deflected. Finally, after having asked multiple times, this rather accomplished researcher frustratingly blurted out that he did not want his article promoted “alongside the University of Pakistan.” In that instant, everything became clear. There is no institution named The University of Pakistan. Cureus, however, recently published several articles from South Asian-based institutions, namely India and Pakistan. What I suddenly realized is that this person was merely pissed (and seemingly offended) that his “aristocratic” article (allow me some artistic license here) might appear alongside “unworthy” South Asian articles. To put it more bluntly, this otherwise truly accomplished author was just a racist old fool.

In an effort to defuse the situation I complied with his request to remove his article. Upon further reflection I now feel a deep sense of gratitude to this old racist for providing me the opportunity to expose how racism—implicit and overt (like this case), sadly lurks in the background of all peer-reviewed journals. Truthfully I am amazed that so many in this day and age are still clueless about what is happening in medical science. As I sit writing this in a world-renowned Chinese hospital, I am surrounded by the very type of medical excellence that my racist critic deems unworthy of his association. A close American friend of mine (and Cureus editorial board member) is one of the premier pediatric cardiac surgeons in the world, having invented several important heart operations. He has visited several South Asian hospitals that have refined his original operation, enabling them to operate on vastly more patients than him, and do so at less than 10% the price of a U.S. hospital. In light of this, it strikes me as complete foolishness to restrict such important medical knowledge. Scholarly racism is utterly self-defeating for authors, readers and the world at large.

Although I could find no formal studies documenting the extent of racism within scholarly journals, there is a modest body of research and other evidence pointing towards the existence of sexism, as well as prejudice against non-academic physicians, in the world of academic publishing [1-3]. Perhaps it is time to formally study the extent of racial bias in peer-reviewed journals. Any takers?

Recently, the CEO of an authoritative digital health website shared an interesting statistic with me: 40% of the articles published in the New England Journal of Medicine, arguably the most important medical journal, originate within a 200 mile radius of the journal’s headquarters. No one would disagree that Boston, New York and New Haven are centers of academic excellence, but the medical community that dominates the NEJM represents but a tiny fraction of world physicians, thus excluding an immense amount of clinical experience and knowledge. Although such willful blindness or elitism is not as blatant as the prejudice exhibited by my new acquaintance, does a hugely influential and even entitled societal institution like the NEJM not have a responsibility to open itself up to more of the world of medicine?

While I will continue to respect the world’s leading medical journals for the important work they publish, I remain proud that Cureus serves the vast numbers of physicians truly in the trenches of medicine who have been disenfranchised through what might be best termed “scholarly elitism.” Lastly, I want to thank this narrow-minded dolt for reminding me yet again why Cureus’ mission is so important to the world of medicine.

References:

1). Pololi LH, Civian JT, Brennan RT, Dottolo AL, Krupat E. “Experiencing the Culture of Academic Medicine: Gender Matters, A National Study.” J Gen Intern Med. 2012 Aug 31; [Epub ahead of print] PMID: 22936291. [PMC free article] [PubMed]

2) http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/05/plos-one-ousts-reviewer-editor-after-sexist-peer-review-storm

3) From abstract to impact in cardiovascular research: Factors predicting publication and citation. Eur Heart J. 2012 Winnik S, Raptis DA, Walker JH, Hasun M, Speer T, Clavien PA, et al. From abstract to impact in cardiovascular research: Factors predicting publication and citation. Eur Heart J. 5 June 2012 [Epub ahead of print] PMID: 22669850. [PMC free article] [PubMed]