BMJ sports journal beclown themselves

[Hoardasurass]

So the san Pablo trans study has dropped and its bullshit results say that theirs no difference between men with special identities and women.

Yet the authors have already admitted major flaws qith their study and most sprts scientists are already calling it outas the bs it is however Dr Blair Hamilton of Manchester Metropolitan University claims that more muscle mass doesn't mean more strength 🤪

Share token for the article
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/8fb1fab99e30ac23

But if the BMJ Group is going to publish unreviewed, unverified, poor quality papers, the disclaimer needs to be right at the beginning. In a text box headed WARNING in dayglo caps.

From the Independent article:
"Experts, who were not involved in the study, urge caution in interpreting the findings, though many appreciate it as a step in the right direction."

I'm sure it's just (in)judicious use of the comma, but this does sound a bit like they're giving a disclaimer - "No experts were involved in this study!"

In which case one wonders why they bother, it might as well be a fanzine.

There's an entity which publishes scientific articles, not just medical ones, called Frontiers Media.

It says "Each manuscript submitted to a Frontiers journal goes through a series of research integrity assessments before peer review, multiple checkpoints during review, and a final validation before publication."
https://www.frontiersin.org/about/peer-review

Compare and contrast.

TBH, peer review is broken. Reviewers are far too often PhD students or recent post-docs on zero-hours contracts. I don't mean to denigrate them but the reality is that they're not the true experts in their various fields. The social & economic pressures on them to approve fashionable papers are not insignificant, nor are the time constraints - most junior academics I know have to work a second job to pay their rent & eat.

I posted this on the other thread discussing this paper and thought it would be relevant here too.

https://www.voidifremoved.co.uk/p/beef-trifle

“To illustrate the problems with this paper, its conclusions, and the way these are being represented in popular media, I will simply address the single most implausible supposed finding: that there is no difference in upper body strength between female athletes and males after cross-sex hormones and testosterone reduction….

…What has happened here is:

• A team of researchers at São Paulo University conducted research at the request of men with a vested interest in being included in female sports, which compared below-average men with low grip strength to national-level female athletes in the top 1% of female performance.
• Another team of researchers at São Paulo University included this in a systematic review and - instead of dropping it because of the clear methodological issues and confounding factors - combined it with multiple other studies that can’t be directly compared, and produced a result so incoherent as to be meaningless.
• Then, they declared in their conclusion that because they had a meaningless result they had found an “absence of strength disparities”, while arguing their research was evidence against “blanket bans”.
• This was then published by the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

This was immediately picked up and circulated widely - from news outlets to Wikipedia - as clear evidence that male athletes given cross-sex hormones do not have a performance advantage against female athletes, and thus should not be subject to blanket bans.

The systematic review’s conclusion that there is a lack of strength disparities and that this has implications for sports policy is based on statistically untenable foundations. While I tend to give short shrift to those on the sidelines who cry foul about science that is inconvenient to their political aims, it really does seem that the chain of trust in science has been seriously damaged by activism and groupthink in the area of sex and gender. From paediatric gender medicine to sports science, badly designed studies and papers with obvious issues are being waved through by compliant journals, and shoddy, meaningless results spun as triumphs by political partisans. These generate exactly the expected headlines, which translate into pressure on institutions and political leaders. We need to be able to rely on the scientific method to provide us with a dispassionate and neutral assessment of the evidence which rises above such blatant policy advocacy.”