GENERAL MEDICAL LITERATURE
We in this section offer commentaries on a broad survey of recent articles in the English literature. Articles are mostly chosen for two reasons: their potential translational value for immediate clinical practice or to help in determining where clinical practice might evolve to. Today’s subjects are of general medical interest.
Guess where the SARS CoV-2 virus really originated?
Interestingly, just hours after the new Trump administration took over, the CIA shifted the organization’s assessment of the COVID origin to the lab leak theory. As a sidenote, this analysis allegedly began during the Biden administration but was, apparently—gentlemanly—left for the new CIA director in the Trump administration (1), John Radcliffe, to announce (we miss you already, Dr. Fauci!).
Simple common sense, even in the early months of the pandemic, already made this the most likely explanation. It did not take the sophistication of a spy agency to recognize that China’s principal SARS virus research facility was in the city where the outbreak started, that the Chinese government announced a military takeover of this facility, that the government shut down all information about the outbreak, and that innumerable attempts to find an animal source in the wet market of the city failed.
And then, of course, came the Fauci-NIH cover-up, until it became increasingly clear that not only was the Chinese national research center the most likely source, but the research that may have produced the virus was—likely secretly and illegally—financed by NIH funds provided by Fauci and Francis S. Collins, MD, then the head of NIH (and, therefore, the prospective and unlimited pardon of Fauci by Biden).
What a story!
What makes the story even more fascinating is the fact that the new NIH boss is Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, who the Fauci/Collins team desperately tried to sideline after he was one of the principal signatories of an open letter to the NIH, known as the Great Barrington Declaration, which severely criticized basically all of Fauci’s recommendations.
And he published two months ago a summary of a devastating House report on the Department of Health and Human Services’ mostly false COVID propaganda, on which the Biden administration spent almost $1 billion, making the point that any pharma company running such a campaign “would have been fined out of existence” (2).
Reference
1. Pandy E. Axios. August 26, 2025. https://www.axios.com/2025/01/26/cia-covid-lab-leak-theory
2. Bhattacharya J. Brownstone Institute. November 2024. https://www.todayville.com/1233511-2/
The continuously growing problems with medical publishing
It is getting harder to open a medical or science journal without finding an article that, in one way or another, complains about the current situation in medical and scientific publishing. Here are a few examples: Nature magazine suddenly discovered (we’ve been writing about this for years) that flawed trials pollute “gold-standard” medical reviews (1). Of course, they do—just as they pollute meta-analyses. And the more garbage that gets into the literature, the more garbage will come out of it, to reinterpret an old IBM dictum.
And then there are, of course, all the problems with the peer review process, which—at least in many journals—can only be described, to varying degrees, as definitely lacking. An article in Medscape Medical News therefore unsurprisingly raised the question: “Can science trust peer review?” (2) And guess who is asked to answer the question? The US District Court for the Southern District of New York will be determining whether scientific publishers have been compromising the peer review process on purpose and for profit because a California-based neuroscientist filed a class-action lawsuit against six of the most prominent publishing houses.
As the article, however, also points out, not everybody agrees that things are getting worse. Some so-called “experts” interviewed on the subject felt that these difficulties have turned a corner because of increasing research on the topic and more public discussion. We don’t think so, as our introduction already indicated, but we will see!
That our impression may be the correct one is also supported by an even more recent article in Medscape Medical News, pointing out an increasing credibility crisis in scientific publications in general (3). And artificial intelligence (A.I.) is not making things any better. To the contrary, quoting a paper in Science magazine, the article claims that journals have become inundated with low-quality contributions generated by A.I. Citing recent studies, the article also had nothing good to say about peer review, with valueless peer reviews, of course, severely damaging the integrity of scientific literature.
But likely the most surprising article we noted in our ongoing literature review was in The New York Times of January 24, 2025 (electronically), and on January 26, 2025, in print, written as a Guest Essay by Charles Piller, usually an investigative journalist for Science magazine, under the title “Fraud Has Delayed A Cure for Alzheimer’s” (4). In an unusually long piece occupying almost two full pages of the newspaper’s Opinion Page, Piller concluded that research into Alzheimer’s disease “has been rife with deception,” and what the article really accused some prominent scientists of was outright scientific fraud.
Data fabrication in research on Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease even resulted in the ouster of Eliezer Masliah, MD, as scientific director of the National Institute on Aging’s (NIA) neuroscience division after—among other accusations—being found guilty of “falsifications and/or fabrications involving re-use and relabeling figure panels representing different experimental results” (5).
Masliah has been an author or co-author of over 800 peer-reviewed papers and was considered one of the world’s leading experts on alpha-synuclein, a protein involved in Alzheimer’s as well as Parkinson’s. Based on his now-tainted research, this protein has been the target of several clinical drug trials.
Scientific fraud is, of course, at the very bottom of all the problems medical and scientific publishing is suffering from. It not only involves the researcher(s) who commit the fraud, but also the peer review process that does not discover the fraud, the journal that publishes the paper, the publisher who owns the journal, the academic institution that does not control what is happening in its laboratories, the professional society that does not speak up when it becomes clear that something in the field is not “kosher,” the granting organization with its own failed peer review process and follow-up to awarded grants, and many other players. In short, the undeniable increase in scientific fraud is unrefutably symptomatic of a multi-organ disease for which a cure is urgently needed.
And now, a word about so-called “predatory journals”—so-called because they misrepresent themselves as scholarly journals for, in principle, mostly financial gain and without usually even meeting scholarly publication standards. An editorial in The New England Journal of Medicine recently addressed this subject in an attempt “to protect their prey,” which, of course, are the scientists who publish in these journals (6). Suffice it to say, publishing papers in such journals will impress only the uninformed. Signed by 12 senior editors of leading medical journals, the editorial basically summarized what can be done to minimize the impact of such predatory journals. Unsurprisingly, there, of course, exist mutual service benefits between paper mills and predatory journals, which, in practical terms, means that one will rarely find a decent paper in a predatory journal. But that must be communicated. The editorial, therefore, divided its recommendations between authors, institutions, funding organizations, and journal editors. Definitely worth a quick read!
And while we’re already talking about paper mills and predatory medical journals, let’s not forget about what one could call “predatory authors.” A news item in Nature magazine recently noted the proliferation of “precocious” early-career scientists who have racked up huge numbers of citations since 2019 (7). According to a preprint (please note the preliminary nature of preprints!), these authors, on average, publish more than one paper per week (wow!).
And while they may just represent an especially busy and hardworking group of investigators, publishing more than one paper per week, of course, raises serious questions—even if one works in a large group that shares authorship (Ioannidis JPA, et al. Preprint at bioRxiv https://doi.org/n2cz.2024).
References
1. Van Norton R. Nature 20125;637:256-257
2. Turone F. Medscpape Medical News. October 9, 2024. https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/can-science-trust-peer-review-lawsuit-targets-publishers-2024a1000ifu?form=fpf
4. Piller C. The New York Times. January 24, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/24/opinion/alzheimers-fraud-cure.html
5. Alzforum. October 17, 2024. https://www.alzforum.org/news/community-news/data-fabrication-ousted-nia-neuroscience-director-eliezer-masliah
6. Laine et al., N Engl J Med 2025;3923):283-285
7. Soliman A. Nature 2025; 637:525-5226
Trouble at eLife
And to stay on the subject of medical publishing, the science journal eLife has been in the news for some time. To be specific, it has been in the news since it announced a radically new publishing model involving not only open access (which, of course, is no longer considered a new model) but also posting all submissions sent out for review along with their reviews before deciding whether to accept or reject a paper. Indeed, only a small minority of submitted papers are ultimately accepted.
Having used this process for some time now, everyone receiving their weekly (sometimes even bi-weekly) listing of papers cannot help but be impressed by the number of submissions. From a business standpoint—considering a $2,500 review fee—the model has obviously been very successful, leading to an explosive increase in recruited editors at the journal, though with some internal upheaval.
Now, however, Clarivate, the UK-based company that calculates a journal’s Impact Factor (IF), has announced that it will stop assigning eLife an IF. (The IF reflects how often papers published in a given journal are cited in other publications and is, therefore, widely understood as a quality parameter for a journal.) Unsurprisingly, as a recent article in Nature magazine noted, submissions have already dipped (1). The article further notes that while other journals and publishers have been enticed to consider this model, this new development may halt any consideration of adopting this model, or even just parts of it.
Reference
1. Kwon D. Nature 2025;637:258-259