Andrew screaming about professional fouls

In a recent blog post, Andrew announced that "he will keep screaming about this sort of thing forever" (link).

And I will be right there with him.

The "sort of thing" that upset him this time is when authors of a peer-reviewed journal article chose a misleading title. The accused title is "....: A long-term experimental study of ..." Anyone who reads more than the abstract learns that by "long term", the authors meant three days. As Andrew quipped, since they aren't studying amoeba, three days do not long term make.

Frustratingly, this paper is not a special outlier in the world of academic publishing. Such misleading titles or abstracts are common enough, and no one seems to be willing to call them out.

This is a nice example of what I've been calling "professional fouls" (see this post), a term borrowed from sports. A professional foul is an act recognized by outsiders as a foul but not considered a foul by insiders since "everyone does it".

In football (soccer), the so-called diving is a professional foul. Most players perform this act and most players aren't agitating for strict refereeing to root out this practice. In pro basketball, I find the last few minutes of a game unwatchable because it consists of a series of professional fouls leading to free throws. The entire profession pretends that this is "smart strategy". Smart strategy is if the community agrees to forbid this ridiculous tactic.

I complained about similar abuse of journal titles before. For example, what Pfizer titled "six-month safety and efficacy" suggests that participants in the clinical trial has been observed for at least six months to determine the vaccine's efficacy after six months. Based on my analysis, 80 percent of the participants in that study were observed for five months or fewer - and would never arrive at the 6-month point because the FDA had allowed placebo participants to get vaccinated, and almost all decided to take the shots. Just because a small number of participants were observed for six months, Pfizer called the study a "six-month" study.