It’s super easy to just check their conclusions. I followed up on several papers yes and no on the vax question. There was no skullduggery as every paper I looked at was represented fairly in the scoring.

As in other scientific efforts, this is not just a ‘trust me, bro’ situation. They provide references.

[–] Korkki@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Not what I really meant. I was after that one has to trust them to actually provide a suitable and representative coverage on all the papers released on the subject.

[–] porksnort@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 day ago

I see, thanks for clarifying.

I think that concern is partly covered by their scoring. If a bad-faith actor put together a distorted gathering of papers that favored their conclusions but weren’t cited widely, those papers would have very small circles.

So it would be visually apparent that either: they were being dishonest in their research gathering, or the question has not yet been studied widely enough for this tool to be useful.

The more I think about this the more I love this project and their way of displaying the state of consensus on a question.

[–] UniversalBasicJustice@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 day ago

Something I've seen on some PubMed meta-analyses is the inclusion of the various search terms and inclusion/exclusion criteria used; something along those lines maybe?