Exaggerated Claims — Has “Publish or Perish” Become “Publicize or Perish”? | The Scholarly Kitchen

At the recent STM Innovations meeting, a number of new initiatives were discussed along a similar theme — promoting the works of authors, essentially marketing their papers to drive citations, public awareness, and chances for academic recognition. While one aspect of these networks is a basic narcissism (my profile with my picture about my papers and my data promoting my career), another aspect is that in an increasingly crowded publishing landscape suffering from filter failure, promotional efforts have stepped in to create awareness and differentiate one study from the others ... A recent study in the BMJ suggests that the downsides of PR and promotional activities around scientific reports may be more pervasive and consistent than the occasional black eye. The authors studied 462 academic press releases from 20 leading UK universities and compared these to 668 news stories based on these press releases and their related studies. They found that 40% of the press releases contained exaggerated claims about causality while 36% contained exaggerated inferences about the significance of the research to human or animal research. Most of these exaggerations found their way into news stories, with 81% of the exaggerated causality claims making the news and 86% of the exaggerated claims of importance carrying over. When press releases were not exaggerated, only 17% of news stories contained exaggerated claims.  The authors took a good amount of time evaluating each instance, with each set of press release-to-paper-to-news-stories requiring 3-4 hours to code for their dataset. The authors also note that they did not include journal press releases, which can be issued on occasion separately from academic press releases. They also did not study press conferences or the increasing trend of splashy meeting announcements linked to synchronized online publishing by major journals.  This study was carried out among UK universities and press outlets. It would be interesting to compare that to US counterparts, because my impression is that US academic institutions and press outlets have been at this longer. Whether this would lead to lower rates or higher rates is an open question. My hunch is that US health reporters are even more dependent on press releases than are their UK counterparts ..."