Effect of Vibram FiveFingers Minimalist Shoes on the Abductor Hallucis Muscle
Nicholas A. Campitelli, DPM1, Kaitlyn N. Bernhard, Alan Kidon, DPM, Kristen Heard, DPM, Scott A. Spencer, DPM, ABPOPPM, FACFAOM, and Jill S. Kawalec, PhD Journal of the American Podiatric Medical Association In-Press.
Now I have read the full paper, there is another big problem with it.... anyone see it?
The whole paper is woefully short of what would be considered the minimum standard for the reporting of research. ... not be mention that under the conflict of interest declaration none is declared ... BUT, the lead author is on the Vibram Advisory Board . ... ffs, that is what the declaration is supposed to be for!
The fan boys are going to have wet dreams over this, but I guess they won't notice what is wrong with it.
The above JAPMA link leads to an error page: "The requested article is not currently available on this site."
For the sake of curiosity, is there any obligation for authors to declare who has funded their research? I mean, any research, not only those looking exclusively into a certain commercially available product.
Yes, JAPMA have removed the publication. I can speculate that it was for the reasons mentioned above and what I blogged about.
This was not a case about the funding of the research, but was one of the authors declaring:
when the lead author is on the vibram advisory board. He is listed here: http://www.vibramfivefingers.it/advisory-board.aspx
Not disclosing that conflict is serious business, especially when in the conclusion to the paper the authors tried to link the research to the Vibram class action lawsuit!
Generally, there is nothing necessarily wrong with having a conflict of interest, it just needs to be declared.
This could turn out to be a tad bit embarrassing for JAPMA. They simply "deleted" the paper from the website rather than replace it with a "retraction notice" which is what is normally done in these situations.
I see. It feels probably more lenient than one would conventionally expect in the context of "science" and "research" in my country, must be a difference in the established philosophies of science. I just wondered, in general, why there's apparently no rule to declare the source of funding (public, private) of any published research; the funding source potentially has an unabridged power to influence the research, hence its disclosure should ensure the objectivity of the research. Sorry for being off the subject.
I haven't paid special attention to that until now but have got an impression that it is often done in an evasive and box-ticking manner, e.g. "Conflicts of Interest and Funding: Authors stated no financial relationship to disclose." Not particularly informative at all.
Who then tipped them off to the failure to disclose that conflict of interest? I do know the sequence of events that lead to the editor being informed. Somewhat of a disingenuous response from JAPMA.
From reading that, it appears that JAPMA are going to republish the paper with the conflict disclosed and not withdraw it because of the fatal flaws in the methods and analysis. Epic fail. JAPMA should be embarrassed that the paper even got through the peer review process.
Is that not the same as what happen with the fake vaccine researcher that found a link between vaccines and autism, but did not declare that he was funded by lawyers who wanted to sue vaccine makers.
This is a yet another serious breach of publication ethics. Time for the APMA to act and replace the staff at JAPMA and improve processes. They are clearly out of their depth. There is a reason why JAPMA's Impact Factor has been languishing at about 0.5 for years while all other foot and ankle related journals are going up.