Research to Read With Care
February 22, 2008 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
The American Journal of Biochemistry and Biotechnology is published by Science Publications, which is a self-described “international publishing company having regional offices all over the world” that (in somewhat ungrammatical language) provides “a forum for scientists to get knowledge of recent developments in all areas of science and actively pursue ways to keep you informed about our activities.”
Issue 2, Volume 4 of 2008 contains a number of articles about autism, including a study on “evolution of autism” by S. Hossein Fatemi, M.D., Ph.D.; studies linking autism to oxidative stress; a study suggesting that “some autistic children have a significant increase in the frequency” of a polymorphism of a certain gene, the ALAD 2 variant allele may be more susceptible to lead toxicity. Some of the authors (Jeff Bradstreet, M.D.; S.Jill James, Ph.D.; Woody R. McGinnis, M.D.; Martha Herbert, M.D., Ph.D. ) are familiar names regarding biomedical treatments for autism. One author, Richard Lathe, has written a book about autism and the environment that relies on “extremely haphazard science” in regard to what he calls “new phase autism.”
As often when reading about autism and hypotheses of its aetiology, caveat lector.
This is definitely the tough part for me … figuring out what is credible …
I hate to admit it but I just get confused.
Sometimes there is too much information.
If you read through the website, there’s some other interesting uses of grammar, as well as some errors, and the quality is questionable. Why is Martha Herbert publishing with Brian Hooker, who has some very strong opinions about autism and mercury and the CDC?
Hi Kristina, the American Journal of Biochemistry and Biotechnology is a very new journal published every three months (as compared to every month for most top journals). It is still a peer-reviewed journal, which theoretically should mean that non-related peers (other scientists) have reviewed the papers and accepted the science as appropriate enough for publication. Now, I say “in theory” because a lot of bad science gets published some times (even in the top journals) that’s why replicability of findings is so important. This doesn’t mean we should ignore science, but that, as you imply, we should be informed consumers of scientific findings. Nestor.
I used to teach Freshman Composition and were I doing this now, I would definitely include “autism and autism research” as a topic to teach students about research and science, credibility, validity, sources. Students aren’t the only readers who have a lot to learn these days.
There are journals and then there are journals, even when peer-reviewed.
Since this one is newish, you may have to read each paper carefully to see what the methods are and the references, since that built on garbage has some probability of being garbage, and also the opposite.
One method to evaluate relative merit would be to look at the Impact Factor and ranking.
Description of Impact Factor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor
As Nestor points out as well, another thing to look for is non-replication or corroboration of results, preferably by an independent research group. One swallow does not make a summer and one result does not make a fact.
What one considers to be a respectable ‘peer reviewed’ scientific journal depends more on ideology than actual science. The two respectable peer reviewed journals devoted exclusively to ‘autism’ can also be held to scrutiny, debate and argument about the ideological leanings of the respective journals, but there is no scrutiny.
The science journals ‘Autism’ and the ‘Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders’ (I have made occasional contributions to the JADD myself) are under editorial control of the leading ideologues of the polygenic hypothesis.
Both of these journals have fallen into disrespect in some quarters since the the loss of editorial leadership of Professor Eric Schopler (who passed away) and Sir Michael Rutter (who is in semi-retirement).