Who's asserting what?
Here’s an interesting question to ask your students. Have them follow this link and ask “Did the BMJ find that Pfizer was at fault in Nigerian drug tests?”
The answer is no, of course. The Nigerian government found they were at fault. And honestly, that may be enough. The whole affair looks pretty fishy.
But look through the complexity here.
First of all, that link? It’s to the nih.gov site? So is the NIH saying this? (No.)
It’s part of a collection made available by the National Library of Medicine and has a PubMed ID — are they the publisher? (No.)
It’s printed in the BMJ — is this a peer-reviewed finding? (No.)
Is it the BMJ asserting Pfizer was at fault? (No.)
Is it the BMJ breaking a story about this? (No.)
What is it actually, then? Well, it’s a well-known medical journal re-reporting a story that was initially reported in the Washington Post about a finding of the Nigerian government. The journal is then aggregated and made searchable by the National Library of Medicine through PubMed as part of the National Institutes of Health. To make matters more confusing, the BMJ didn’t simply re-report the Washington Post story, but added some value by providing historical context, and getting comment from Pfizer.
In this case, each stage of this chain brings value. The report is a government finding, the significance and authenticity of which the initial Washington Post story verified. The BMJ added more context, as well as new information in the form of Pfizer’s comment. The NLM indexed the article and made it findable to all doing research.
But if we don’t understand what part of chain is making what assertion, bad things happen. Take this claim from a year ago — Even though Dr. Fauci was against Hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19, he had actually approved it in 2005! For coronavirus no less!
This claim was huge last summer, and it created for many the appearance that Fauci was trying to actively undermine working treatments for political reasons. And, as they say, big if true. But it’s not true. It’s not true at all.
You can probably guess where this is going. Here’s how the viral article (which you could see on Facebook page after Facebook page last July) phrased the discovery:
The Virology Journal – the official publication of Dr. Fauci’s National Institutes of Health – published what is now a blockbuster article on August 22, 2005, under the heading – get ready for this – “Chloroquine is a potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection and spread.” (Emphasis mine throughout.) Write the researchers, “We report…that chloroquine has strong antiviral effects on SARS-CoV infection of primate cells. These inhibitory effects are observed when the cells are treated with the drug either before or after exposure to the virus, suggesting both prophylactic and therapeutic advantage.”
Here’s the article. Can you see what’s going on?
The folks spreading this have mistaken the aggregator here (the NIH, which literally indexes 27 million articles in 7,000 journals via PubMed/MEDLINE) for the researchers because nih.gov is in the URL. This is sort of like saying that Facebook publishes the New York Times. Or actually, worse, it’s like saying that Mark Zuckerberg writes all the New York Times articles.
Oh, shoot, even that doesn’t capture it. It’s like saying that every news story ever seen on Facebook expresses the personal views of Mark Zuckerberg, who is also the lead writer of every news story every seen on Facebook.
Of course if you do our “Just Add Wikipedia” trick, you’ll quickly find out that the Virology Journal is not even produced by an American publisher. And if you look at the SCImago rankings (a very imperfect measure to be sure) you’ll find far from holding a special place in virology it’s not a particularly prestigious journal, coming in at 30th in a list of all virology journals. And that’s not 30th in all health journals — that’s 30th in all journals specifically on virology:
Again, we don’t want to get into the whole journal prestige wars, but a run of the mill article in the 30th ranked virology journal is not the blockbuster report we were promised.
But none of this really matters unless students understand:
Article authors own their assertions
Journals do not assert the claims made in them, but assert the value and quality of the research.
Aggregators and search engines do not assert claims OR assert the value and quality of the research, they just make it findable.
Walking through this with students in any science course will raise some interesting questions, and provide students with valuable insights that will serve them well (and maybe protect them from the nonsense detailed above). Give it a whirl!