If a study is worth a mention, it’s worth a link

Gur Huberman points to this op-ed entitled “Are Good Doctors Bad for Your Health?” and writes:

Can’t the NYT provide a link or an explicit reference to the JAMA Internal Medicine article underlying this OpEd? A reader could then access the original piece and judge its credibility for himself

I replied: Yes, very tacky of the author not to even mention the authors of the study, nor to give a title or a link. And poor practice of the NYT editors not to demand this. Also ironic that one of his policy recommendation is to “require that doctors provide patients with data about a procedure, including its rate of success, complications and the like, before every major intervention”—but he can’t be bothered even to provide a link to the study.

P.S. I’m not saying that every fact or even every obscure reference in an article needs to be references. Readers can always use Google and Wikipedia on their own. But when the entire basis of a column is a published study, it’s poor form not to link, and even poorer form not to say who did the study.

P.P.S. Sometime after I posted this, the NYT editors slipped in a link to the original study, which is by Anupam Jena, Vinay Prasad, Dana Goldman, and John Romley. See here for the original version of the op-ed which had no link. The newspaper version of course had no link, nor did it name any of the study’s authors.

13 thoughts on “If a study is worth a mention, it’s worth a link

  1. I had pretty good luck contacting an author and tracking down the study mentioned in a different article. I thought it was strange that explicit references were not provided.

  2. One of the annoying complications is that a link often doesn’t exist at the time the story is written. The journal sends out copies and gives an embargo time, and the story is written and goes live when the embargo ends. It’s fairly common for the paper not to be up at the journal when the embargo ends. Embargo Watch complains about the issue here:https://embargowatch.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/the-pnas-problem-when-papers-arent-available-when-the-embargo-lifts/

    With the DOI system the story could contain the doi.org URL, but even that’s not really satisfactory when the journalist doesn’t know when the link will start working.

    • Good point.

      However, online newspapers should make it a policy on articles that are based wholly around a single study to have a visually standardized sidebar element where readers can always find the link to the study, along with the time and date of its availability (e.g., 9 am EST 11/24/2015).

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