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Record W2136435586 · doi:10.1111/cts.12233

Mixing Politics and Medicine: A Case Study

2014· editorial· en· W2136435586 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Arthur M. Feldman

Bibliographic record

VenueClinical and Translational Science · 2014
Typeeditorial
Languageen
FieldHealth Professions
TopicHealth and Conflict Studies
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPoliticsGlobeHarmReductionismVettingPolitical scienceAlternative medicineLibrary scienceMedicineLawEpistemologyComputer sciencePathology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Like physicians and scientists around the globe, I have been deeply saddened over the past months by the death, destruction and psychological harm wrought on noncombatants across a large swath of the Middle East.However, I was equally distressed by the July 28, 2014 publication in the Lancet , one of the world's leading medical journals, of an anti-Israel diatribe by Manduca et al.entitled "An open letter for the people of Gaza." 1 Initially, I took a reductionist view of the article: academic journals have no place mixing medicine and science with politics.Indeed, this view was supported by 77.5% of respondents to an August 2014 poll by MedPage Today. 2 However, as I read the responses to the original letter, reviewed the guidelines for editors and perused the very limited literature related to the topic of medicine and politics, I realized that the issues were complex and that the publication provides an important case study that can inform future editorial decisions by both our own journal and by others.A case study about the publication of political treatises in a medical or scientifi c journal evolves around three questions: 1) Did the journal meet the established codes of conduct for journal editors?2) Are case studies or published guidelines regarding editorial decisions related to the topic informative?And 3) Are there historical perspectives that can or should inform editorial decisions?Did the Lancet , meet the established codes of conduct in publishing the letter?Four organizations have developed ethical guidelines for both editors and authors: the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) ( www.WAME.org); the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE, www.pubicationethics.org); the Council of Science Editors (CSE, www.councilscienceeditors.org ); and the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE, www.ICMJE.org).Although the guidelines created by these international groups do not directly address the issue of political treatise in medical journals, they present key principles that are of potential relevance to the present discussion: 1) the importance of peer review; 2) the need to disclose all confl icts of interest; and 3) the editor's responsibility to insure the integrity of the published record.While only some journals request peer review for opinion pieces, commentaries and editorials, COPE guidelines note that editors that achieve best practices: 1) undertake peer review of all reports and reviews; 2) clearly identify sections or articles that are not peer-reviewed; 3) publish a description of the peer review process; and 4) develop a transparent "policy to encourage maximum disclosure of the provenance of non-research articles." ( www.publicationethics.org ) Th e Lancet notes that: "Every Article, Case Report, Hypothesis, Seminar, and Review published in The Lancet has been peer reviewed," but that: "Occasional

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.010
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.031
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Editorial · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.021
Threshold uncertainty score0.059

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0100.031
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0040.004
Science and technology studies0.0210.010
Scholarly communication0.0090.007
Open science0.0030.009
Research integrity0.0140.011
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0060.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.195
GPT teacher head0.585
Teacher spread0.390 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEditorial

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2014
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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