Guff alert

Dodgy academic PR -Ben Goldacre-  Bad Science

Now you may be inclined to think that a journalist should be capable of doing more than simply reading, and then rewriting, a press release: but we must accept that these are troubled times. Through our purchasing behaviour – and I assume someone cleverer than me measures these things competently – we have communicated to newspapers that we want them to be large and cheap, more than we want them to be adequately researched.

So in this imperfect world, it would be useful to know what’s in academic press releases, since these are the people of whom we are entitled to have the highest expectations. A paper in the Annals of Internal Medicine this month shows very clearly that we have been failed.