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Comment by currymj | Hacker News Reader

it's important to note that the nih.gov domain doesn't mean this is endorsed in any way by the NIH. (In case you were very shocked, like I was.)

It's just a link to PubMed, which is an aggregator of journal articles hosted by the NIH's National Library of Medicine.

Nearly any life sciences article published in any kind of journal, good or bad, would end up with an abstract on here. Evaluate it on its own merits.

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Yeah, it's published in "Environmental Research", a journal with an impact factor of 3.8. This is quite low. If the claims made by this paper are true, it has huge implications, so there's two possibilities: 'Science' and other prestigious journals are SUPPRESSING THE TRUTH due to INFLUENCE by BIG WIFI and passing up the opportunity to publish an incredibly important story, or the actual research is garbage.

Impact factors aren't really comparable across fields, or a general indication of the quality and rigor of particular journals.

With that being said, I am skeptical of this paper.

Could you please not use allcaps for emphasis in HN comments?

This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Sorry dang, I'm imitating the, erm, peculiar writing style you'll see when this sort of thing comes up.

I can second this. Having done extensive research on gut health for my own issues, I have read everything nih.gov has to offer. Some articles are based on proper scientific method and decent numbers of test subjects and controlled environments. There are also plenty of papers based on pseudo-science, dogmas and hearsay. After reading through every article they had to offer, it became apparent which articles I could borrow from for my own research and my own health.

I would love to see nih.gov implement a voting and discussion system similar to HN so that folks can debate the poor quality research and improve upon the good research.

if your only goal is to get your work published in something that is technically a journal, this is very easy even if the research is very bad, and then it will likely end up on PubMed.

fundamentally, it is just a specialized search engine, which will point you to articles published elsewhere, that (unfortunately, in my opinion) happens to be hosted on the nih.gov domain.

Aggreed. In many ways they are like wikipedia [0], but they don't provide an easy way (that I can see) to challenge what an article states.

[0] - https://livertox.nih.gov/Ibuprofen.htm

And all their references; to your point, are for PubMed.

Perhaps it a call for reformation is due, or perhaps setting up wiki's and forums that give people a place to challenge and pick apart these articles.

Do you have a citation by any chance? I completely believe you (Because I've seen some things that appear untrue) but want to have it to use as supporting evidence in a debate.

Here, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/disclaimer/ . That gives a pretty clear explanation.

Quote: "The presence of an article in PMC does not reflect an endorsement of, or concurrence with, the contents of the article by NLM."

PMC is PubMed Central, and NLM is the National Library of Medicine is the center at NIH in charge of managing it.

Thank you!

thanks for pointing this out, I wasn't aware of this!

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