This is a prepositioned footnote to explain a series of posts I will be publishing.
I expect to soon be launching a major project that will publish a large number of proper peer-reviews of recent journal articles and some other papers in the THR space. (Fair warning to anyone planning to publish junk in the near future!) So, in order to lay in some material for that, develop protocols, learn-by-doing, and such, I am writing some entries for that collection now. Given that I am doing it, I might as well post them here. To find those posts, look in the comments section below for pingbacks.
[Update: My funding to continue that project was pulled. But you can still find the prototypes via the pingbacks here.]
The publications in this collection will not read like a typical blog essay, though they will be readable and reasonably free-standing, unlike a peer-review for a journal. For those familiar with the latter genre, think of them as a thorough and high-quality journal review — a rarity, I know — with a few hundred words added here and there to make it readable as an essay for someone not intimately familiar with the original paper. (And also with what would have been “the authors should fix this” phrasing changed to be phrased in terms of “the authors made this mistake”, because they also made the mistake of finalizing their paper before seeking the advice they needed to fix it.)
For those not familiar with journal reviews, just know that these pieces will not just address one or a few interesting points, in a narrative style, and not bother with the rest of the paper, as an essay would. They will have those interesting bits, but they will also step through a protocol for addressing each aspect of the paper (e.g., is the literature review in the Introduction legitimate, are the Methods adequately presented, etc.). Some of the bits will probably require reading the original paper to make sense of. For the reviews that I write, I will try to put any interesting narrative bits first, and make those free-standing. This will offer something to casual readers, and if you are not interested in the full review; you can stop reading when you get to the disjoint bits about other aspects of the paper.
That is basically what you need to know to make sense of what you are reading. Once I have the guidelines more developed, I will post a link here if you want to delve deeper. In particular, I will be recruiting freelance contributors to write reviews, so if you are qualified and interested, please take note.
Tobacco harm reduction, anti-THR lies, and related topics 
Pingback: Peer review of: Dunbar et al. (Rand Corp), Disentangling Within- and Between-Person Effects of Shared Risk Factors on E-cigarette and Cigarette Use Trajectories From Late Adolescence to Young Adulthood, Nicotine & Tobacco Research, 2018 | Anti-THR Lie
Sounds like a great idea Carl! Looking forward to it and, knowing you, I’m guessing it will be both very well done AND *very* interesting!
– MJM, a longtime fan…
Can’t wait to add these to my Zotero 1325 item collection on E-Cigarettes.
Wow, is a lot of that critical analyses, or is it mostly just the original articles? If there are many of the former (or even if not) are you interested in going the other direction also? As part of the project (not what I describe here, but related) I am going to need to track down good material that already exists, and I expect to rely on the kindness of those who already have collections.
I’ve criticized research that already exists fairly extensively in TobakkoNacht, but not in great depth. I’m usually “preaching to the Passers-By” — i.e. folks who won’t have the attention, interest, or knowledge to really appreciate the sort of approach I believe you’re planning to concentrate on. I *have* however picked out many of the most glaring individual weaknesses of various pieces of research and research presentations — e.g. Hirayama’s dependence on the honesty of Japanese women about their “hidden smoking” habits (See https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/21/6/536 for some recent corroboration of this problem), or Glantz/Shepard’s Helena claim of a “bounce-back” in heart attacks when the Helena smoking ban was lifted (They hid the fact that the “bounce-back” occurred at the halfway point DURING the ban rather than after it by analyzing the whole ban period as a single data point!)
Your audience is going to be more sophisticated. I might occasionally have ideas to add, but I think your in-depth analyses will be superb in and of themselves!
– MJM
Yes! I am not sure how much of your material is in the right format (a fairly free-standing piece, at least a focused passage) for including. I also expect that a lot of your focus is low-priority for my project (e.g., the debunking of ETS claims will probably make it into my index at some point, but the top priorities are about alternative products). That said, your corpus is definitely on the list of what I would want to mine for entries. Watch your inbox for an invitation.
Will do. Good examples can be seen in the “Book Selections” right beneath the front cover image at http://www.tobakkonacht.com/ Click on the excerpt from the “Of Vapors And Vapers” chapter for the sort of material likely to be of most interest to you!
Pingback: Peer review of: Dunbar et al. (Rand Corp), Disentangling Within- and Between-Person Effects of Shared Risk Factors on E-cigarette and Cigarette Use Trajectories From Late Adolescence to Young Adulthood, Nicotine & Tobacco Research, 2018 | Anti-THR Lie
Just realized that “The Giblets” section there would also be a good one to check out.
Pingback: Peer review of: Michal Stoklosa (American Cancer Society), No surge in illicit cigarettes after implementation of menthol ban in Nova Scotia, Tobacco Control 2018 | Anti-THR Lies and related topics
Pingback: Peer review of: Linda Johnson et al. (Washington U med school), E-cigarette Usage Is Associated with Increased Past 12 Month Quit Attempts and Successful Smoking Cessation in Two U.S. Population-based Surveys, NTR 2018. | Anti-THR Lies and related topics
Pingback: Peer review of: Charlotta Pisinger et al. (U Copenhagen public health), A conflict of interest is strongly associated with tobacco industry-favourable results, indicating no harm of e-cigarettes, Preventive Medicine 2018. | Anti-THR Lies and related topic
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