Daily Archive for February 11th, 2010

Over on Science-Based Medicine, Dr. Amy Tuteur has an entry that’s worth reading. In the piece, she exoriates the publication of medical news that amount to little more than reprints of press releases. Dr. Tuteur’s analysis serves as a worthwhile reminder for people to exercise caution when reading, watching, or hearing reports in the popular press about the benefits of medical therapies.

Even more, the analysis offers a reminder for people who consume educational research via popular media. I have repeatedly read reports of new educational and psychological research published in apparently trustworthy sources which, upon investigation, actually are just a reprint of a press release from a university or other entity with an interest in promoting the finding.

This is really problemsome when even further investigation shows that the press release may not completely accurately reflect the findings of the original research. Shoot, I suspect that some of what passes as content on some Web sites is actually generated by a robot that scans relevant sources (e.g., press releases) and scapes content that meets certain criteria (e.g., includes key words) into a database that can then be served according to a new style sheet.

That’s why one’s supposed to depend on a careful reading of the original report! Here on Teach Effectively, I sometimes include snippets from press releases, but I depend on my own reading of the original research when I write about a new study.

Last week I wrote about a study that purported to show that antidepressants have no effect in mild to moderate depression. A careful reading of the paper shows that the authors dramatically overstated their findings, particularly in their public statements to the media. The study has another implication beyond the misleading claims about antidepressants. It is an object lesson in an ongoing and disturbing phenomenon in mainstream journalism, the wholesale reprinting of press releases of scientific papers instead of reading and analyzing the papers themselves.

Jump to Science by press release.