I always laugh when someone demands to see a “peer reviewed” paper on a topic, as though that means anything worthwhile.
The editors of the world's most prestigious medical journals are sounding the alarm, and nobody is listening.
— MAHA Action (@MAHA_Action) July 1, 2026
"We have peer reviewed, high impact editors in most of the journals that are the most high impact, saying that they don't believe what is being published in those… pic.twitter.com/YxwpgSKKH4
Worth noting, of course, that Michael Mann’s papers were “peer reviewed.”
I am a published author – papers (first or second author on close to 100), medical textbook chapters…I’ve also been a peer reviewer. I also have an extensive background in biostatistics (masters degree in mathematics, taught biostats in medical school).
When I get papers to review I do the math. And find it’s usually suspect. A few authors actually take my questions seriously and fix it. Most others don’t. And lately, I get fewer requests to review…because I “may be too critical”, according to one editor.
Well, OK then. If these were fly by night medical journals (There are entirely too many of them, IMHO) that’d be one thing. But from highly respected journals in my fields?
Glad I’m at the end of my career (I retired from clinical medicine a couple of years back). Both medicine and medical school pedagogy has gone to hell in my lifetime.
So…. Don’t get sick?
AI s going to ultimately ferret out a lot of this garbage posing as research.
What will the AI be trained on, if most of the research is irreplicable and they’ve found corruption everywhere they’ve looked?
It should be trained to always prefix every statement with the phrase: “I believe that…”
Does it matter since AI makes crap up?
I have been using Claude heavily of late and it’s amazing. The amount of made-up crap has dropped by 98 percent from a year ago.
Better hope that it will flag its own “research”. Because those AI models that would ferreting out the problems, are often being used to create more of those problems.
I’m pretty certain [Anthony Fauci]* is broken.
I know [Michael Mann]* of climatology is.
*The Science
Worth noting, of course, that Michael Mann’s papers were “peer reviewed.”
Yes indeed. I highly recommend the reviews by Stephen McIntyre, Ross McKitrick and Abraham Wyner.
It should also be noted that when a paper by McIntyre and McKitrick received favorable peer reviews and was published, the Hockey Team managed to get the offending Associate Editor kicked off the editorial board of Geophysical Research Letters, according to the Climategate emails. I’ve seen how the sausage is made, as an author (~130 papers), editor and reviewer, and I can tell you that for young researchers there are powerful incentives not to offend the gatekeepers of consensus science.
A much more honest approach is putting up preprints on an open source site and getting comments from a large swath of readers. Some are cranks, but a surprising number of comments will be informed and useful. Physicists have been doing this for quite a while and it makes communication faster, cheaper, and more effective. I have a few articles on Anthony Watts’ site where the same approach is used and it is a refreshing change from standard “peer review”.