Dodgy science is being smuggled into medical journals thanks to a loophole in the regulations, say Italian psychiatrists Barbui and Cipriani in an important article.
They focus on agomelatine, a recently-approved antidepressant. But their point applies to all of medicine, not just psychiatry.
Here's the problem. Nowadays, major medical journals have rules governing systematic reviews and meta-analyses of clinical trial data. If you want to review the evidence about how well a certain drug works, or its safety, you've got to do it properly. You have to consider all of the data, not just focus on the results that suit you. And so on.
However, these rules don't apply to "narrative" review papers, which is a broad term meaning any kind of article meant to give a discussion of the pharmacology, history, chemistry etc. behind a particular drug. For a narrative review, there are no rules.
In particular, you can ...
