Caveats for Scientific Publication in the Modern Marketplace

Abstract

The articles of a printed scientific journal are dressed deliberately in the same monotonous house style. This uniformity is expected to minimize a reader’s distraction from the logical sequence of the presented material. It can also obscure the origin, complexity, and significance of the article. Increasingly, a brevity desirable to both the reader and the journal is added to this presentational anonymity. As a result, the publication of clinical trials as printed journal articles is already something of a shorthand. The Editors of printed journals are turning to other media to extend the possibilities of presentation. For example, one journal is converting to a condensed template print publication of research articles, with full papers accessible online (1). The currently available latitude for authors within each section of an article, whether in print or online, still allows the benefit of their perspective. Ultimately, a progressive publication shorthand might put at risk the capacity for informed scientific skepticism by a forced narrowing of that potential. With this trend of publication, the caveat emptor of the reader and the caveat venditor of the authors, as buyers and sellers of the packaged “message,” are not becoming less problematic. The buyers include the reader, typically a clinician scientist who may also be a prescriber, pharmacists, and payers. Another interest group consists of the regulatory authorities and guideline agencies. The authors, as vendors, are involved with their career academic institutions, collaborators, funding bodies, and perhaps commercial interests. To simplify the assessment of clinical trials, in particular, various guidelines to reporting have been developed that give publications a consistent and comprehensive framework, with apparent benefit (2,3). The public registration of trials and a broad consensus on study design, supervision, statistical analysis, and declarations of conflict of interest are widely accepted as partial guarantors of “merchantable quality” (4,5). The scientific article, however, remains far from an adequately assured consumer commodity. Social anxiety about safety, suspicion of the probity of the pharmaceutical marketplace, and the misconduct/unreliability of investigators have provoked political action designed to extend and strengthen existing practical and presenta