A couple of months ago we made a post about the sad state of peer review and offered some alternatives for its improvement. Today, The Scientist has exposed pharmaceutical giant, Merck, as having cooked up a phony, but real sounding, peer reviewed journal and published favorably looking data for its products in them. Merck paid Elsevier to publish such a tome, which neither appears in MEDLINE or has a website.
From the article at Bioethics.net:
"What's wrong with this is so obvious it doesn't have to be argued for. What's sad is that I'm sure many a primary care physician was given literature from Merck that said, "As published in Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, Fosamax outperforms all other medications...." Said doctor, or even the average researcher wouldn't know that the journal is bogus. In fact, knowing that the journal is published by Elsevier gives it credibility!"
The only time peer review is effective is when it's practiced by the Mafia.
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