Comment by jamroom
9 years ago
This quote from the article is a great one:
"It was a very smart thing the sugar industry did because review papers, especially if you get them published in a very prominent journal, tend to shape the overall scientific discussion"
Has the acceptance policy for prominent journals improved that we're sure this is not happening now? I have suspicions that this is likely still happening more frequently then we might expect (i.e. pharmaceutical trials, etc.).
The basic issue is that reviews are just looking for glaring problems in the presentation. To really test an article one has to replicate the experiment from the ground up. And these days thats damn hard and expensive to do.
For the typical reviewer, replication is probably downright impossible.
http://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on-...
The real issue is the reliance on authority rather than actual evaluation of the merits of the papers by everyone.
As indicated in the article, journals at the time often didn't require scientists to disclose their sources of funding, whereas they're now extremely strict about full financial disclosure. You can still get published in a prominent journal with a tricky source of funding, but it will be a matter of public record, and your results will (in theory) be more heavily scrutinized.