Latest news with #IvanOransky
Gizmodo
a day ago
- Health
- Gizmodo
Million-Dollar Project Aims to Expose Bad Medical Research
Armed with funding, algorithms, and a tip line, this new effort aims to dig corrupt studies out of medical literature before they do real-world harm. A new initiative from the watchdogs behind Retraction Watch is taking aim at flawed or faked medical science research to the tune of nearly $1 million. The Center for Scientific Integrity just launched the Medical Evidence Project, a two-year effort to identify published medical research with a negative effect on health guidelines—and to make sure people actually hear about it. Equipped with a $900,000 grant from Open Philanthropy and a core team of up to five investigators, the project will use forensic metascience tools to identify issues in scientific articles, and report its findings via Retraction Watch, the foremost site for scientific watchdogging. 'We originally set up the Center for Scientific Integrity as a home for Retraction Watch, but we always hoped we would be able to do more in the research accountability space,' said Ivan Oransky, executive director of the Center and co-founder of Retraction Watch, in a post announcing the grant. 'The Medical Evidence Project allows us to support critical analysis and disseminate the findings.' According to Nature, these flawed and falsified documents are vexing because they skew meta-analyses—reviews that combine the findings from multiple studies to draw more statistically robust conclusions. If one or two bunk studies make it into a meta-analysis, they can tip the scales on health policy. In 2009, to name one case, a European guideline recommended the use of beta-blockers during non-cardiac surgery, based on turn-of-the-millennium research that was later called into question. Years later, an independent review suggested that the guidance may have contributed to 10,000 deaths per year in the UK. Led by James Heathers, a science integrity consultant, the team's plan is to build software tools, chase down leads from anonymous whistleblowers, and pay peer reviewers to check their work. They're aiming to identify at least 10 flawed meta-analyses a year. The team is picking its moment wisely. As Gizmodo previously reported, AI-generated junk science is flooding the academic digital ecosystem, showing up in everything from conference proceedings to peer-reviewed journals. A study published in Harvard Kennedy School's Misinformation Review found that two-thirds of sampled papers retrieved through Google Scholar contained signs of GPT-generated text—some even in mainstream scientific outlets. About 14.5% of those bogus studies focused on health. That's particularly alarming because Google Scholar doesn't distinguish between peer-reviewed studies and preprints, student papers, or other less-rigorous work. And once this kind of bycatch gets pulled into meta-analyses or cited by clinicians, it's hard to untangle the consequences. 'If we cannot trust that the research we read is genuine,' one researcher told Gizmodo, 'we risk making decisions based on incorrect information.' We've already seen how nonsense can slip through. In 2021, Springer Nature retracted over 40 papers from its Arabian Journal of Geosciences—studies so incoherent they read like AI-generated Mad Libs. Just last year, the publisher Frontiers had to pull a paper featuring anatomically impossible AI-generated images of rat genitals. We've entered the era of digital fossils, in which AI models trained on web-scraped data are beginning to preserve and propagate nonsense phrases as if they were real scientific terms. For example, earlier this year a group of researchers found a garbled set of words from a 1959 biology paper embedded in the outputs of large language models including OpenAI's GPT-4o. In that climate, the Medical Evidence Project's goal feels more like triage than cleanup. The team is dealing with a deluge of flawed information, hiding in plain sight, and plenty of which can have very real health consequences if taken at face value.
New York Times
29-05-2025
- Health
- New York Times
White House Health Report Included Fake Citations
The Trump administration released a report last week that it billed as a 'clear, evidence-based foundation' for action on a range of children's health issues. But the report, from the presidential Make America Healthy Again Commission, cited studies that did not exist. These included fictitious studies on direct-to-consumer drug advertising, mental illness and medications prescribed for children with asthma. 'It makes me concerned about the rigor of the report, if these really basic citation practices aren't being followed,' said Katherine Keyes, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University who was listed as the author of a paper on mental health and substance use among adolescents. Dr. Keyes has not written any paper by the title the report cited, nor does one seem to exist by any author. The news outlet NOTUS first reported the presence of false citations, and The New York Times identified additional faulty references. By midafternoon on Thursday, the White House had uploaded a new copy of the report with corrections. Dr. Ivan Oransky — who teaches medical journalism at New York University and is a co-founder of Retraction Watch, a website that tracks retractions of scientific research — said the errors in the report were characteristic of the use of generative artificial intelligence, which has led to similar issues in legal filings and more. Dr. Oransky said that while he did not know whether the government had used A.I. in producing the report or the citations, 'we've seen this particular movie before, and it's unfortunately much more common in scientific literature than people would like or than really it should be.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Gulf Insider
21-02-2025
- Health
- Gulf Insider
500+ COVID Studies Retracted for Unreliable Data
Retractions are driven by pressure to produce studies quickly, watchdog co-founder says More than 500 studies on COVID-19 have been withdrawn due to 'bias,' 'unreliable' information, or unspecified reasons, a blog that tracks retracted documents, found. Retraction Watch co-founder Ivan Oransky told The College Fix via phone interview one reason for the high number of retractions is the academic system's incentive structure which pressures researchers to rapidly produce studies and get them peer reviewed as quickly as possible. 'Why do they feel the need to rush papers through? Well, it's because that's how they get or keep their jobs, that's how they get grants, everything is based on that,' he said. 'When you know that your whole career depends on publishing papers in particular journals, you're going to do what you have to do to publish those papers. Most of the time that means you work hard, you hire the smart grad students and postdocs,' he said. Oransky also said researchers may feel 'too desperate' or that 'incentives are so stark' that there's no 'humanly possible way' to do it. 'So you start engaging in misconduct,' he said. The articles in the list pertain to risk factors related to COVID-19 vaccines and various alternative treatments for the disease. 'It's really a range of everything from essays to big clinical trials,' he said. Oransky pointed The Fix to one of his research letters examining the differences between retractions of COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 related research papers. The results showed that papers on COVID-19 had a higher likelihood of being retracted or withdrawn within the first six months of publication and that they were more likely removed 'without detailed explanation or for non-misconduct-related concerns.' He said retracting papers is not necessarily a bad thing, as it can correct information that was potentially wrong or misleading. Ensuring clear and concise reasoning for retractions is crucial, he told The Fix . 'The problem is when papers aren't retracted. The problem is when papers sit in the literature, people know there's a problem, but everybody refuses to do anything about them,' Oransky said. Further, many people use retractions to argue the government, drug companies, and others are untrustworthy. Generally, those people either 'have an axe to grind' or are 'just trying to sell the public something,' he said. A retraction simply says the information 'is unreliable.' 'It doesn't remove it from the world,' he said. However, the transparency of the process varies. Some retraction notices provide no explanation, while others include detailed reasons for the retraction. One of the retracted papers in the list, which question why children are being vaccinated against COVID-19, was withdrawn due to 'unreliable' findings stemming from 'inappropriate bias,' according to the retraction notice. Another paper on COVID-19 vaccination risks was completely withdrawn without any explanation. Oransky told The Fix that full withdrawals are not considered best practice. In other instances, retractions occurred because the author or editor sought further information they wanted to include or because of a technical error that occurred during the study that affected the results. The College Fix reached out to the publisher of the COVID vaccination risk study, Elsevier , seeking an answer as to why the paper was removed without an explanation. The publisher said because the article was published in 2020, it wouldn't be able to determine why it was withdrawn within a reasonable amount of time. Click here to read more Also read: Trump Could Be About To Ban COVID Vaccines; Report
