Sunday, January 17, 2016

University Research

At the risk of overdoing it, I'm back on my soapbox about tainted University research.
Academic press offices are known to overhype their own research. But the University of Maryland recently took this to appalling new heights — trumpeting an incredibly shoddy study on chocolate milk and concussions that happened to benefit a corporate partner.

It's a cautionary tale of just how badly science can go awryas universities increasingly partner with corporations to conduct research.

[...]

The University of Maryland is not unique here. There's been a push to commercialize university research, and it's happening across North America.

  Vox
And they've been doing it for many decades. Although I must admit, this may be the shoddiest, least "scientific" study I've ever heard of coming out of a university.
Worse, the scientists didn't even bother to publish their results before publicizing them, according to an excellent probe of the release by the health news watchdog Health News Review.
How could they? They wouldn't have ever gotten past the reviewers.
At the University of Maryland, the vice president of research has stepped in to do an institutional review about the chocolate milk study. The university press office told me that publicizing results of still-unpublished research is "not customary."
I'm willing to bet this "study" never got published - at least not in a scientific journal, where studies are purportedly aimed.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

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