I’ve been wondering about the role of journals in punishing miscreant authors. A senior publisher told me he was uneasy about COPE’s retraction guidelines because although they suggest that redundant publications should be retracted, they recommend that the first publication should remain. The publisher felt that this was condoning and rewarding multiple publication and that […]
Category: Columnists
Douglas Noble: Easter and transplantation
Sally Slater last week celebrated the tenth anniversary of her life-saving heart transplant. Sally was only six when she had the operation and was pictured with Billie Piper after the operation. Now, at 16, she is turning her attention to improving health policy. In last week’s Telegraph (News Digest, March 29) she called for nationwide […]
Siddharta Yadav: Politicizing medical education
Yesterday, I witnessed a doctor being beaten up at the Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital of Nepal. The doctor was exiting the hospital grounds when a group of people stopped him. Few words were exchanged and suddenly, one of the persons from the group repeatedly punched and kicked the doctor. The doctor shouted for help. The […]
Julian Sheather: The ghosts of medicine
I was at the Liverpool Medical Institution recently, judging a debating competition between medical students from Manchester and Liverpool. […]
Richard Smith: Run for your life
What will you be doing on 6 April? There is a high chance that you’ll spend much of the day sat in front of a computer, perhaps seeing patients at the same time. You’re also likely some time in the day to be in a car, bus, or train, consuming carbon. Well, I urge you […]
Richard Smith: Is the NHS three times better than in 1979?
Reading the accounts in the BMJ of how various doctors and mangers would make savings in the NHS, I thought back to a series based on the same idea that I edited when I first arrived at the BMJ in 1979. Then I thought that in 1979 the cost of the NHS was about £35 […]
Martin McShane: Paragraph 142, page 33
The non-executive asked a simple question; “Why can’t we just say no?” In the world of business they inhabit, this is a rational question. We were on one of our regular board development sessions. I had been endeavouring to explain why we were pursuing a particular course of action. Reasonably, but with a modicum of […]
Richard Smith: Web 2.0 overtakes Web 1.0: get with it
Last week in the United States Facebook for the first time had more traffic than Google. This is hugely significant and shows how interacting is taking over from searching on the internet. What’s more, Facebook’s traffic is increasing steeply, whereas Google’s traffic is largely static. Soon Facebook will be way ahead. […]
Richard Smith: Scrap peer review and beware of “top journals”
The neurologist and epidemiologist Cathie Sudlow has written a highly readable and important piece in the BMJ exposing Science magazine’s poor reporting of a paper on chronic fatigue syndrome, (1) but she reaches the wrong conclusions on how scientific publishing should change. […]
Tracey Pérez Koehlmoos turns the light on for donors and non-communicable diseases in developing countries
Last week two very important persons from a big donor agency came to visit me in my office in Dhaka. These men have vast experience in global health, and the agency for which they work has helped greatly with improving health and alleviating poverty in the developing world, especially in Bangladesh. I was humbled to have […]