Online research
Aug. 16th, 2006 14:25![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
darkfyre_museThis was posted to a community that I watch. I think it gives a good perspective and can be appled to more traditional research as well.
We live in the age of Google, and there's a vast amount of information out there of varying degrees of quality. How do you sift the wheat from the chaff? There's any number of sources, with varying degrees of validity and authority.
1. There's independent peer reviewed research, which has to to pass a lot of rigorous (and sometimes laughably political) tests to get published.
2. There's research funded by corporate and political interests with an agenda which may or may not have strong biases
3. There's people, some of them researchers, some not, who have set themselves as experts of varying quality
4. There's write-ups of research by journalists who usually don't understand the science
5. There's people who appeal to any of the above as sources of authority, and write about it.
6. And at the very bottom of the barrel, is Wikipedia.
A. Always check original sources
It's always best to go back to the original source data if at all possible. If you read something health related about a "study" online, you sure as hell don't believe it unless you can find an abstract of the original paper. At least 80% of the time, the author was confused about the implications, or even the purpose of the study. You end up with headlines like "excess eating makes you fat" and "apples are good for you." If the study itself hasn't been linked, you can usually find it quickly enough by searching:
http://www.pubmed.gov
http://scholar.google.com
typing: site:nejm.org probiotic into Google will return every indexed article about probiotics on the New England Journal of Medicine
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anejm.org+probiotic
B. Learn the language of authoritative sources.
"contraindicators" "toxicity" "side effects" "interactions" "warnings" "long term" "fda" "nih" "pdr" "merck" "mechanism" "protocol" "carcinogenic" "supplementation" "placebo" "trial" "therapy" "risk"
C. A little science goes a long way.
Knowing the function of say, your liver, gall bladder, the immune system, pancreas, and thyroid gland, or say, the chemical processes that lead to cancer, helps you see the big picture.
D. Testimonials without underlying explanation are the first sign of quackery.
The last place you should be citing as an authority is the site where they're trying to sell you something.
And don't discount modern research's ability to look into alternative therapies. There's a lot of starving researchers out there looking to find the next big thing (and perhaps their dissertation topics or next grant proposal) by discovering the exact chemical and physical processes by which an alternative therapy may work. That's how many of our allopathic medicinal breakthroughs get made.
We live in the age of Google, and there's a vast amount of information out there of varying degrees of quality. How do you sift the wheat from the chaff? There's any number of sources, with varying degrees of validity and authority.
1. There's independent peer reviewed research, which has to to pass a lot of rigorous (and sometimes laughably political) tests to get published.
2. There's research funded by corporate and political interests with an agenda which may or may not have strong biases
3. There's people, some of them researchers, some not, who have set themselves as experts of varying quality
4. There's write-ups of research by journalists who usually don't understand the science
5. There's people who appeal to any of the above as sources of authority, and write about it.
6. And at the very bottom of the barrel, is Wikipedia.
A. Always check original sources
It's always best to go back to the original source data if at all possible. If you read something health related about a "study" online, you sure as hell don't believe it unless you can find an abstract of the original paper. At least 80% of the time, the author was confused about the implications, or even the purpose of the study. You end up with headlines like "excess eating makes you fat" and "apples are good for you." If the study itself hasn't been linked, you can usually find it quickly enough by searching:
http://www.pubmed.gov
http://scholar.google.com
typing: site:nejm.org probiotic into Google will return every indexed article about probiotics on the New England Journal of Medicine
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anejm.org+probiotic
B. Learn the language of authoritative sources.
"contraindicators" "toxicity" "side effects" "interactions" "warnings" "long term" "fda" "nih" "pdr" "merck" "mechanism" "protocol" "carcinogenic" "supplementation" "placebo" "trial" "therapy" "risk"
C. A little science goes a long way.
Knowing the function of say, your liver, gall bladder, the immune system, pancreas, and thyroid gland, or say, the chemical processes that lead to cancer, helps you see the big picture.
D. Testimonials without underlying explanation are the first sign of quackery.
The last place you should be citing as an authority is the site where they're trying to sell you something.
And don't discount modern research's ability to look into alternative therapies. There's a lot of starving researchers out there looking to find the next big thing (and perhaps their dissertation topics or next grant proposal) by discovering the exact chemical and physical processes by which an alternative therapy may work. That's how many of our allopathic medicinal breakthroughs get made.
