5 ms·

Before anyone gets too excited, this is a paper from a third party (six authors from various state funded science and technology institutes in Beijing.) It is

Before anyone gets too excited, this is a paper from a third party (six authors from various state funded science and technology institutes in Beijing.) It is being hosted on the NIH’s mirror of an Elsevier journal. Specifically, the URL decodes as: * PMC: PubMed Central, an information portal hosted by * NCBI: The National Centre for Biotechnology Information, part of * NLM: The National Library of Medicine, brought to you by the letters * NIH: The United States National Institutes (more than 1!) for or-is-it-of Health. (The hyphenated part is silent.) As for the paper itself, it’s just too bad that their Data Availability Statement is basically “yes” without linking to it. Googling the file names in their R scripts found them easily enough.

bawolff 5y ago
Why would that alter my level of excitement? I know different journals are of differing levels of quality, and im not in the know enough to assess which is which, but i would never assume that the NIH is the only group that knows how to do science.
- gorgoiler 5y ago
  For me, HN putting the paper’s title next to “TLA.gov” gave the former the weight of the latter, suggesting this was a US government finding. But, with respect to the original authors, it’s more like “Mice did this!” alongside “www3.docs.nih.gov/~jeff45/theories/drafts/mice.htm?”
ImaCake 5y ago
It is routine for basically all papers in medicine research to be hosted on PMC. Often they host the entire article, not just the index and abstract. The reasons for this open access are complicated but boil down to certain rules from funding bodies. I have no idea if the particular Elsevier journal (in the banner at top of the page) is reputable, but the science here seems at least robust. If I wanted to discredit this paper, I would point out the authors developed an analysis technique they want to apply to other diseases/models. COVID is a nail and they have a specific hammer, no matter if it’s the right kind of hammer.

bawolff 5y ago

Why would that alter my level of excitement? I know different journals are of differing levels of quality, and im not in the know enough to assess which is which, but i would never assume that the NIH is the only group that knows how to do science.

gorgoiler 5y ago
For me, HN putting the paper’s title next to “TLA.gov” gave the former the weight of the latter, suggesting this was a US government finding. But, with respect to the original authors, it’s more like “Mice did this!” alongside “www3.docs.nih.gov/~jeff45/theories/drafts/mice.htm?”

ImaCake 5y ago

It is routine for basically all papers in medicine research to be hosted on PMC. Often they host the entire article, not just the index and abstract. The reasons for this open access are complicated but boil down to certain rules from funding bodies. I have no idea if the particular Elsevier journal (in the banner at top of the page) is reputable, but the science here seems at least robust. If I wanted to discredit this paper, I would point out the authors developed an analysis technique they want to apply to other diseases/models. COVID is a nail and they have a specific hammer, no matter if it’s the right kind of hammer.