Response to a PLoS One Article
March 13th, 2008My father, former head of the Microbiology Department at ODU, responded to an e-mail my hippie brother sent out about the recent Prozac debunking:
I seriously doubt that the PLOS Journal of Medicine, which I’ve never heard of in all my 35 years in the field, has any merit. If it even does exist, then I doubt that it is a refereed Journal which requires no less than three outside reviewers to substantiate the data, the statistics and the conclusions. While one cannot dispute the placebo effect, I wonder why this article was not submitted to a more prestigious journal.
Attention people who work at the Public Library of Science: You need to do a better job of getting the word out.
Attention Academia: You need get more involved with new media.
That is all.
So what is your opinion of PLOS? And does your former head of the Microbiology Department have any sort of conflict of interest, like receiving research funds from the pharmaceutical companies?
No conflict of interest. He simply wasn’t aware of PLoS One. I think this is symptomatic of academia being resistant to the way the Information Age works. We can’t reference Wikipedia in papers, and it’s taking time for them to realize the legitimacy of open-source peer-reviewed journals.
Ahh.