Dealing with editorial misconduct: What about spin?

doi:10.1136/bmj.330.7487.364-a

BMJ 2005;330:364 (12 February), doi:10.1136/bmj.330.7487.364-a

Letter

Dealing with editorial misconduct

What about spin?

The first 100% of the full text of this article appears below.

EDITOR—With reference to Godlee's article on editorialmisconduct I would like to have seen a commitment to apply thesame standards of rigour to press releases and media commentarythat announce the published research.¹ Don't blame hype allon the press. Journals have been known to feed the frenzy by:

Allowing generalisations to be made from narrow and specificresults
Giving undue prominence to a single "contrarian" result,whenmany others suggest the opposite
Allowing purely theoreticalconstructs to be interpreted asreality and empirically based
Allowing evidence free assertions about long term promiseofthings, such as cures for cancer
Interpreting statisticalinsignificance as evidence of no effectrather than insufficientpower or a demand for excessive thougharbitrary confidencethresholds.