On November 8, 2021, the American Heart Association journal Circulation published a 300-word abstract of a research paper warning that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines caused heart inflammation in study subjects. An abstract typically summarizes and accompanies the full paper, but this one was published by itself. According to Altmetrics, the abstract was picked up by 23 news outlets and shared by more than 69,000 Twitter users. On the basis of that abstract, a video on YouTube, a social media outlet that circumvents YouTube’s anti-misinformation policies, pronounced COVID-19 vaccinations “murder.” Sixteen days later, the American Heart Association added an “expression of concern,” noting that the abstract might not be reliable, and on December 21 it issued a correction that changed the title to indicate that the study did not establish cause and effect, noting there was no control group nor a statistical analysis of the results.
The incident underscores a flaw at the center of the scientific enterprise. It’s all too easy to make outsize claims that sidestep the process of peer review. No publication should carry a standalone abstract, particularly one making such a bold claim, and particularly during a pandemic. But the problem goes much deeper than that: Even scientific papers that have passed through the intended safeguards of peer review can become vectors for confusion and unsubstantiated claims. The history of the scientific journal goes back hundreds of years. In 1731 the Royal Society of Edinburgh launched the first fully peer-reviewed publication, Medical Essays and Observations, initiating what has become the gold standard of credibility: vetting by experts. In the traditional model, scientists conduct original research and write up their findings and methodology, including data, tables, images, and any other relevant information. They submit their article to a journal, whose editors send it to other experts in the field for review. Those peer reviewers evaluate the scientific soundness of the study and advise the journal editors whether to accept it. Editors may also ask authors to revise and resubmit, a process that takes anywhere from weeks to months. By 2010, most traditional scientific journals also had digital counterparts. The “open access” movement makes roughly 1/3rd of those available to the public for free. Meanwhile, the number of science publications and the number of published papers increased dramatically, and most academic institutions established themselves on social media to help promote the work of their researchers.
In this new world, scientific journals and scientists compete for clicks just like mainstream publications. Articles that are downloaded, read, and shared the most reception a high “impact factor” or Alt metric Attention Score. Studies show that people are more likely to read and share articles with short, positively worded, or emotion-invoking titles.
The rating system can’t help but affect scientists’ publications and their careers. “Many [scientists] are required to achieve certain metrics in order to progress their career, obtain funding, or even keep their jobs,” according to PhD candidate and researcher Benjamin Freeling of the University of Adelaide, who was lead author of a study on the topic, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2019.
“There’s less room for a scientist to work on a scientific question of immense importance to humanity if that question won’t lead to a particular quantity of publications and citations,” he wrote in an email to Open Mind. Valuing exposure above the scientific process incentivizes sloppy and unethical practices and demonstrates British economist Charles Good hart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
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