BioMed Critical Commentary™

_______________The Other 90% of Science_______________

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BioMed Critical Commentary

BioMed Critical Commentary solicits, organizes, archives, and distributes analytic comments on biomedical subjects. The initial implementation of BioMed Critical Commentary encompasses all published articles having been assigned a PMID (PubMed ID) number by the US National Library of Medicine.

BioMed Critical Commentary is a community data hub, resembling a cross between a wiki and the Amazon.com review pages. Posted comments are permanent, but their rankings can evolve.

A comment in BioMed Critical Commentary can be referenced similarly to a standard journal style. Example for a signed comment: Smith B. Title of comment. BioMed Crit Comm 2008; 1:25. Example for an unsigned comment: ScreenName or Anonymous. Title of comment. BioMed Crit Comm 2008; 1:26.

Philosophy

The current system of scientific journals serves well certain constituencies: the advertisers, the journals themselves, and the authors. It is the underlying philosophy of BioMed Critical Commentary to serve the readers in preference to any other constituency.

Science currently carries a number of deep inefficiencies that are not inherent and could potentially be overcome. For example, journal clubs examine journal articles of high interest in order to cull nuggets of deeper insight, but their analytic products are then lost through failing to be recorded and distributed. Conferences, hallway conversations, reviews submitted by peers to a journal upon submission of the author's manuscript, and personal realizations concerning a publication are systematically lost.

While the works of authors are recorded and retrievable, the insights of the readers have no mechanism that would preserve their "institutional memory". Journals have largely dismissed any responsibility to sustain commentary on the articles they publish. The published "letters to the editor" are but a peek at the available reader commentary submitted and rejected for publication.

Browser plug-ins: Check out Critical Commentary from anywhere, any time

If you use Firefox or Internet Explorer 7 or later, your browser's search toolbar automatically will be aware of the BioMed Critical Commentary search plug-in. While at our home page, pull down on the dropdown arrow at the side of the search toolbar and click to "Add" the BioMedCC plug-in. Once this is done, when you subsequently browse at another site such as PubMed, you can select the BioMedCC searchbar using the same pulldown button, and type or paste an author name or PMID# into the toolbar at any time to check out the available commentary.

For Firefox users -- Use this feature with right-clicking! When the BioMedCC searchbar is selected and when you are at PubMed or any other site, you can use you cursor to select an author's name or a PMID# on a displayed page. Right-click on the selected text and choose to search BioMedCC. The search results will appear as a separate page.

Guidelines for submissions and editing policy

BioMedCC is a managed site. We hope to filter out spurious entries while permitting sharing of analytic comments largely without restriction.

BioMedCC requests contact information to aid in editing. For example, if your comment becomes stripped of a section of words due to whatever reason, or a key phrase seems unintentionally ambiguous, we would need to contact you.

When commenting on an article, if you wish to reference a second publication, providing a PMID number in the form "PMID: ######" will allow readers to link out to a PubMed entry and to any BioMed Critical Commentary entries for the referenced work. The BioMedCC link will be shown as a CC after the PubMed link, such as "PMID: ###### CC".

Similarly, when referencing a BioMed Critical Comment during commenting on an article, providing the CCID (Critical Commentary number) in the form "CCID: ######" will allow readers to link directly to the same BioMed Critical Commentary.

If you wish to include a pdf or public html document within your comment, please send the pdf file or the html file to editor at bm-cc.org. Reference the name of your submission. Please refrain from copying an internet link into your comment; such links are not permanent, and our filters will remove the link. Instead, simply put a conspicuous note in your comment, such as "(Put pdf here)".

Commentators, we urge you to sign your comment at its end using your name and email address. During editing, we will confirm your identity by email. Why would you desire to publicly sign your comment, when you are permitted to use a created screen name or to post anonymously? First, signing most closely recapitulates the style of a letter to the editor. Second, your eponymous comments are more likely to be recognized and have influence. Third, the original author, upon whose paper you are commenting, is most likely to respond to a request for response when the commentator is eponymous. Such a discussion of opposing views is important to improving the scientific literature and has been under-represented in recent decades.

BioMed Critical Commentary is composed of analytic content. Opinion is as welcome as are facts, but an analytic, potentially testable, argument must exist. Here are some examples of how we may edit a submission:

A submission having the comment, "This is a better paper than the prior paper on the same subject," would simply be rejected.

Or consider a submission having the comment, "This paper by Williams et al is largely distinguished from similar contemporary publications by Smith et al and Jones et al (PMID: ##### and PMID: #####) in that only the Williams paper included control transfections to exclude transfection toxicity as a possible cause of the results. The Williams paper was not as good as the followup paper by Watson et al (PMID: #####), however." The comment would be posted after editing to delete the second sentence, for the second is not analytic.

Original authors may wish to aid readers by clarifying certain published details, providing additional detail, or supplying access to databases. Authors are often in the best position to comment upon the history, quality, or impact/followup of a publication, but may also desire to make available comments or items extending the original work, thereby increasing its usefulness to readers. Authors are invited to provide an http address in a comment, permitting readers to link to such resources. Commentators who are not the original authors of the commented-upon work are advised, as described above, to supply a pdf or html file rather than an active link.

The category of the submission should be assigned based on the following guidelines. BioMed Critical Commentary may choose to re-assign the submitted category to achieve a more consistent editorial style for the categories.

History: The events leading up to and surrounding the publication of the paper. Issues of priority fall in this category.
Quality: The experiments presented and their interpretation. Ethical concerns, bias, and conflicts of interest.
Extension: Additional details or databases that increase the value or transparency of the published work.
Impact: The follow-on events occasioned, or not occasioned, by the publication of the work.

The title should be adequately complete to help the reader distinguish among multiple comments that may be posted regarding the same publication. BioMedCC, for example, might edit two similar titles to improve the distinction between them.

Known glitches

The PubMed records are incomplete, which affects the search feature at BioMed Critical Commentary. For example, many of the older PubMed author lists are limited to ten authors, and thus the "true" last authors are displaced with middle authors, and will not be retrieved, in our searches. Please email the PMID# of the affected article to editor at bm-cc.org to request a correction to our author list.

Currently, author searches do not translate English letters into non-English letters (such as 'e' to the accented 'e'), and your search results will often omit the desired author if the entered name is not the original name. You can enter the initial part of a name to avoid this limitation or you can use the % symbol as a wildcard replacing any number of characters.

BioMed Critical Commentary is a trademark of Critical Commentary LLC.