A related problem is that researchers who cite other published research sometimes misinterpret that research or take findings out of context, and this can be hard for readers of the new paper to detect. I’ve learned to be suspicious of meta-analyses for this reason. On numerous occasions in my work (mostly in infectious disease research), I’ve gone to check underlying references and found that they were either misquoted or missing important context that affects the interpretation.
A five-sentence letter to the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, which appeared in 1980, was cited hundreds of times during the early years of the opioid crisis in the 1990s, usually to support claims that opioid addiction is very rare when opioids are medically prescribed. This letter may have played a significant role in fueling the crisis. https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMc1700150The letter did in fact report on hospitalized patients prescribed opioids, and the authors did find that it was very rare for opioid addiction to develop during the closely monitored hospital stay. However, the study was not peer reviewed, included a single hospital, did not follow the patients to see if they were addicted after they went home, and did not include any data on patients prescribed opioids for use at home.
A related problem is that researchers who cite other published research sometimes misinterpret that research or take findings out of context, and this can be hard for readers of the new paper to detect. I’ve learned to be suspicious of meta-analyses for this reason. On numerous occasions in my work (mostly in infectious disease research), I’ve gone to check underlying references and found that they were either misquoted or missing important context that affects the interpretation.
A five-sentence letter to the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, which appeared in 1980, was cited hundreds of times during the early years of the opioid crisis in the 1990s, usually to support claims that opioid addiction is very rare when opioids are medically prescribed. This letter may have played a significant role in fueling the crisis. https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMc1700150The letter did in fact report on hospitalized patients prescribed opioids, and the authors did find that it was very rare for opioid addiction to develop during the closely monitored hospital stay. However, the study was not peer reviewed, included a single hospital, did not follow the patients to see if they were addicted after they went home, and did not include any data on patients prescribed opioids for use at home.