How an Anti-Mask Screed Was Created As a “research”
A recent article in a journal called Medical Hypotheses argued that maybe we shouldn’t wear masks. He cites the results of a summer study conducted even before we understood the pandemic, and his arguments are inconsistent. But it looks like a scientific study, and it was divided into social media and some news sites, as if it was a study.
For experts in the field and people who have followed COVID-19 research over the past year, the newspaper’s claims are clearly not backed up, and its arguments are neither new nor interesting; it is basically a repetition of claims that have been refuted over and over again (including here at Lifehacker ).
But a lot of people shared this because it looked like legitimate research. It was often called the “Stanford Study” or the “National Institutes of Health Study,” and the fact that it was published in a peer-reviewed journal seemed to lend some credibility to it. So let’s see why these signifiers are not really relevant.
What is the difference between research and journal article?
A variety of articles are published in scientific journals. Many of them describe research, which I would call an experiment or a set of experiments aimed at finding the answer to a part of the question from the real world. A clinical trial of a drug or vaccine is one example of a study. Another example is the statistical analysis of the incidence of the population. A laboratory experiment done with test tubes and microscopes is another one.
But journals also publish other materials, such as reviews, that collect previous research and comment on the similarities and differences in their findings. They also publish opinions and editorials, which can certainly include evidence-based arguments for or against public health advice such as wearing masks.
There are also magazines that are, shall we say, weird. The journal in which this recent anti-camouflage article appeared is called Medical Hypotheses , and although it is a peer-reviewed journal, it does not publish empirically valid research. He says about himself:
… “Medical hypotheses” were and still exist to provide an unbiased look at radically new ideas and assumptions in medicine, opening the field for radical hypotheses that would have been rejected by most mainstream journals.
Appearing on PubMed doesn’t do anything “NIH research.”
The National Library of Medicine, part of the National Institutes of Health, maintains a database of articles published in medical and health-related journals. This database, known as PubMed , is a useful tool for finding articles and sharing abstracts.
However, if you didn’t know it, you can follow the link to the PubMed annotation, notice the large NIH logo in the corner, and assume that the article was published by the NIH or that it describes research conducted by the US NIH. But the NIH just manages the database; very few of the 32 million citations describe research actually carried out by the institute.
This is not the Stanford Study either.
There are Stanford scientists who have published somewhat controversially motivated research on the pandemic , but this is not the case. A common tactic in disinformation campaigns (for example, campaigns to disseminate information about Plandemic ) is to rely on someone else’s previous position or their connection with people or institutions with which they may have interacted in the past, even if this affiliation is no longer accurate or current.
In the case of this anti-mask article, the author indicated that it belongs to the “Department of Cardiology, Veterans Affairs, Palo Alto Health System / Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, USA”. But according to Stanford himself , the author is not affiliated with Stanford, aside from a year’s tenure as a visiting researcher in 2016.
According to a fact-checking report from Reuters, these red flags did not send a signal to many people who shared the study, including on multiple pages of local news. One popular post from a conservative website used the phrase “Recent Stanford Study Published by the National Institutes of Health NCBI”, which is doubly false. If they had read a little further, they would have known better. Sometimes people share what they want to believe, not things they can actually believe.