Comment by conorh

My wife and I were just talking about this yesterday. She is an extremely specialized surgeon and she is horrified by the academic publishing in her area of expertise. It is often utterly wrong and conflicts directly with her experience. I'm not sure she'd agree with the reasons mentioned in this article here as the main issue - although we have personally seen less ethically motivated doctors publishing research to help line their pockets via the industry. In her opinion the main issue is that academic doctors HAVE to publish in order to advance their careers. So you end up with a never ending stream of terrible research, churned out by doctors that are not experts in doing research and that actually spend most of their time doing other things. This happens even at the best centers; at least in her area of expertise. I don't know what the solution is, but I do know that whenever she has needed treatment for herself she generally ignores most of the research and talks to the most experienced surgeon she can find.