This is a new style of con game – setting up a journal that sounds as if it’s a specialist journal when it’s actually just some undergraduates writing essays.
Orac read the latest issue and pointed out some of the raving nonsense in it, presumably because it’s called the Yale Journal of Medicine & Law and so should be expected to know better. It sounds like an actual journal, doesn’t it, written by and for specialists in medicine and law. It turns out (according to commenters) it’s no such thing. Well then why call it that? Besides to deceive and trick people, that is.
Kids today. Phooey.
Comments
22 responses to “The Yale Journal of Quantum Physics and Neuroscience”
Personally, I was not angered by the suggestion that chiropractic has become mainstream. Again, this is a difference between CAM in the US and UK. Few American chiropractors make the kind of claims that Simon Singh confronted. Mostly, they are in the business of pain management and sports medicine, and some of them are pretty effective.
Does chiropractic have a weird history? You bet, and no doubt some of ’em remain attached to it. But if you want to see weird, check out the history of osteopathy. If your family physician is a D.O., know that she comes from a long line of loonies. But so what? Look to current practice, not history. Drexel University College of Medicine in Philadelphia traces its history to Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania and Hahnemann Medical College. Hahnemann Medical College was named for the founder of homeopathy!
Ken there are an abundance of American DC fruit loops as well, many of them graduates of Life Chiropractic College or similar programs, which have since lost any semblance of accreditation due to rank incompetence and quackery. Not that this had any effect on the already practicing former students, of course. Sure, there are chiros out there who behave more like DPTs, but there is absolutely no way to tell them apart from the truly wacky sort that believe (or at least advertise) that adjusting your back will cure you of EVERY ailment from asthma to zoonoses, or even from the less wacky but no more valid sort that load their practices with supplements and apparatuses for sale. All of them have exactly the same credentials. The fact that the field is at least 2/3 invalid is ample reason for me to avoid them altogether and seek out a skilled Physical Therapist instead.
It appears that the publication may be bending the rules governing student organizations at Yale. These rules include the following phrasing: “Any undergraduate organization wishing to incorporate the name of Yale into its title must secure permission to do so … In order to obtain approval by the Yale College Dean’s Office, the organization should be certain (1) that the nature and purpose of the organization are clearly evident from its title, and (2) that its proposed name does not imply University endorsement of the activities, services, or products offered by the group. Therefore, the words “Undergraduate” or “Yale College” must appear in the organization’s title or subtitle, and must be prominently displayed. … Permission to continue to use the Yale name is contingent upon maintaining these requirements and conforming to the regulations applicable to the organization.” (quoted from http://yalecollege.yale.edu/content/manual-undergraduate-organizations#g (archived: http://www.webcitation.org/612ilKO5G ), linked from http://yalecollege.yale.edu/content/publications-and-masthead-disclaimer )
The official name of the publication in question is “Journal of Medicine and Law, Yale: An Undergraduate Organization” (according to https://apps.students.yale.edu/uor/RegisteredOrganizations ; archived: http://www.webcitation.org/612ii19FD ) which satisfies the letter of the regulations; however, the “undergraduate” part is not included in the title or subtitle of the publication on their website ( http://www.yalemedlaw.com/ archived: http://www.webcitation.org/612ih24mq ), nor is it “prominently displayed”. This appears to be a violation.
The people to contact about this would seem to include: Denise Castellano (email is: her name, separated by dots, at yale.edu) at the Yale University Licensing Program (although that seems to focus on clothing licensing) (name found here: http://www.yale.edu/licensing/trademark.html ) John Meeske (email is same form), the Associate Dean for Student Organizations and Physical Resources (name found here: http://yalecollege.yale.edu/content/office?tid=39 ) and the publication itself: editor@yalemedlaw.com .
Hopefully this will be useful!
(also posted at Orac’s site)
I notice the commenter you linked to appears to be Linda Rosa, who has worked to show what nonsense “therapeutic touch” is and why it should not be a part of nursing education or hospital practice.
@Christopher, it’s Emily Rosa you’re thinking of, not Linda Rosa.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Rosa
Christopher is quite correct:
http://www.scienceinmedicine.org/fellows/Rosa.html
And so are you, Charles. Emily Rosa is a child, or at least was, at the time of the experiment debunking TT. I wonder if the two are related?
The title of this post just about gave me a heart attack. Last thing I need is to see a whole journal dedicated to my pet peeve.
Interesting about Linda Rosa and Emily Rosa. Christopher probably knows if they’re related or not; this is His Subject.
If it’s the same Linda Rosa, she’s Emily Rosa’s mother and was a coauthor on the paper about therapeutic touch.
Also, that was published in 1998, so Emily Rosa is now an adult (I think she was nine years old when she did the research as a science fair project, and 11 when it was published).
Interesting comment by Jesse Weinstein above! Sorry it got held up.
I really do think that “journal” should have a much less misleading name. Fair’s fair.
Correct – Linda Rosa is Emily Rosa’s mother.
Yes, Jesse is correct, I am glad that was pointed out, thanks everyone for keeping everyone honest. Also, they seem to have removed the chiropractic article, and added this to the home page: “Note: Some of the articles in our latest issue, “Alternative Medicine,” have been temporarily removed for revision. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.”
What I really hate is the recent practice of some chaps (usually from India or Africa, it has to be said) to found online-only journals with names that are always very deceptively similar to those of highly renowned scientific journals. So, e.g., if there is an important journal for Whateverists that is called “Whateverics” they would look if there is already a “Whateverics Journal” and then found it if it does not yet exist. Then they pretend to have peer review, and they may even have one, but they accept any crap they get submitted no matter how bad the reviewers’ assessments because they take a fee for every article they publish.
It is like a diploma mill for publications: hacks can inflate their publication lists, and the editors earn money. And I am am on the receiving end of scientist-spam that is particularly difficult for a filter to catch, getting ridiculous “calls for papers” from impressively-sounding but visibly unprofessionally run scam journal. So this is not just a problem with alt-med cranks.
It’s similar to the Templeton Foundation’s way of setting up “institutes” and the like that sound very hallowed-academic, like The Faraday Institute.
Ach je, I should really proofread my comments more thoroughly…
The students in the psych dept. at my grad school had a joke that they wanted to name the departmental newsletter ‘Psychological Bulletin,’ cause then they’d all get to say they’d been published in PB. It wouldn’t be their fault if people made the mistake of assuming they meant one of the field’s major journals that just happens to have the same name. They were ethical enough that this was only a joke, though, unlike the example that kicked off this discussion.
I sent email to one of the Yale deans about this, wearing my “Yale class of xx” hat, and got a reply this morning. He says he willl look into this, and that calling it the Yale Journal of Blah-blah sounds like a major violation of Yale policy.
Hey, way to go Vicki!
Did you say so at Orac’s too?
Yes, I said so at Orac’s as well.
More back and forth with the Yale official: the magazine has taken some articles offline “temporarily” for revision, and the dean has told them that they have to show him the next issue before it goes to press. (I am assuming that if the university wasn’t happy with how they were using the Yale name, the students could go ahead and publish as “Greater New Haven Pontificator” or the like and that would be fine.)
I saw that you did.
Greater New Haven Windbag would be totally fine!
You’re a hero. Srsly.
Yale – isn’t that a brand of locks?