Two more cases of hype in glamour journals: magnets, cocoa and memory

This study was promoted by the Northwestern University "Electric current to brain boosts memory". And Science tweeted along the same lines. Science‘s link did not lead to the paper, but rather to a puff piece, "Rebooting memory with magnets". Again all the emphasis was on memory, with the usual entirely speculative stuff about helping Alzheimer’s disease. But the paper itself was behind Science‘s paywall. You couldn’t read it unless your employer subscribed to Science. All the publicity led to much retweeting and a big altmetrics score. Given that the paper was not open access, it’s likely that most of the retweeters had not actually read the paper. When you read the paper, you found that is mostly not about memory at all. It was mostly about fMRI. In fact the only reference to memory was in a subsection of Figure 4. This is the evidence. That looks desperately unconvincing to me. The test of significance gives P = 0.043. In an underpowered study like this, the chance of this being a false discovery is probably at least 50%. A result like this means, at most, "worth another look". It does not begin to justify all the hype that surrounded the paper. The journal, the university’s PR department, and ultimately the authors, must bear the responsibility for the unjustified claims. Science does not allow online comments following the paper, but there are now plenty of sites that do. ...
Source: DC's goodscience - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Academia altmetrics Alzheimer's Bad journalism badscience false discovery rate public engagement Public relations Public understanding publishing randomisation randomization RCT science communication cocoa false positives h Source Type: blogs