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So why shouldn't we as reporters just stick to absolute risks?
The problem is that unless you're dealing with a large randomized controlled trial, absolute risks can be misleading, too. They carry hidden baggage, such as age, overall health, ethnicity and so on — all things that on their own could influence your risk of getting sick.
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The respected and influential Cochrane Collaboration has just published a systematic review of research on different ways of presenting risks and reductions in risk in a health context. It won't come as a surprise to regular readers of this website that they concluded that some aspects of the presentation really do make a difference. But maybe there are a few surprises in their detailed findings.
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Peer review is necessary since it improves the quality of published research but it is not infallible and may need updating, say representatives for some of the UK’s top scientific journals. The comments were among written evidence to The House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee’s inquiry into the current and future effectiveness of peer review. The evidence was published on 17 March.
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Ben Goldacre, the estimable British blogger, has pointed out a problem that is so egregious I wouldn’t have even thought to look for it. Too many bloggers and journalists, he tells us, are not linking to primary sources. And what’s worse, many of those missing links are obscuring grotesque distortions of what the primary source contained.
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Why don't journalists link to primary sources? Whether it's a press release, an academic journal article, a formal report or perhaps (if everyone's feeling brave) the full transcript of an interview, the primary source contains more information for interested readers, it shows your working, and it allows people to check whether what you wrote was true. Perhaps linking to primary sources would just be too embarrassing. Here are three short stories.
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Again, nothing generalizes perfectly. There are plenty of good stories out there, and some reliably good science journalists. I thank them for their efforts in spite of a not very supportive environment. Meanwhile, though, I think that the real demands of a large swath of the population for reliable, informed, and proportionate science reporting simply aren't being met.
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Both of those headlines are about the very same paper, and I get the impression the reporters hadn't even read it, but instead relied on teasing out comprehensible angles from interviews. We ought to have a rule: if you can't read the research and comprehend it, you shouldn't be writing about it. I know, suddenly 9/10ths of the science journalists in the world are abruptly unemployed.
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