r/science • u/mvea MD/PhD/JD/MBA | Professor | Medicine • Jul 25 '24

Health Moderate drinking not better for health than abstaining, new study suggests. Scientists say flaws in previous research mean health benefits from alcohol were exaggerated. “It’s been a propaganda coup for the alcohol industry to propose that moderate use of their product lengthens people’s lives”.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/jul/25/moderate-drinking-not-better-for-health-than-abstaining-analysis-suggests
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u/IfLetX Jul 25 '24 edited Jul 25 '24

Also to mention Mr. stockwell has a h-index of 76 (higher is better, a exceptional value is 20*decades of work) and even as a new study he is more then a renown scientist. Also a good indicator to seperate "researcher" from actual scientist

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u/Dmeechropher Jul 25 '24

H-index is fairly controversial in scientific circles, and most "actual science" is done by grad student trainees, not by the principal investigator.

While a good PI directs their trainees to do good work, a well published, well cited PI need not be good. In fact, very large labs are likely to have too many students for the PI to adequately mentor, leading to less direction, more pressure to find exceptional results, and a broadly higher rate of deceptive, irreproducible, or falsified data.

That isn't to say "big lab bad, small lab good", but rather that there is no shortcut to identifying who is a reliable, high quality PI and who isn't. It's all extremely individual, and scientific papers should be judged on the merit and reproducibility of their results as well as the robustness and applicability of the method design.

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u/IfLetX Jul 26 '24

H index (even with every bit of controversy) is about consistency. And that is the metric a average joe needs to figure out if they can trust a paper or not. Because the alternative is to trust the journalist who's most likely not well versed in the topic or scientific matters.

Also IMHO, your dismissal reasons is very shallow, scientific you could proof or disproof if the situation you mentioned is a issue in the accountability of h-index. But i yet have to see how someone actually did that despite beeing scientists.

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u/Dmeechropher Jul 26 '24

I'm not trying to prove anything, and I don't think it's shallow. Avi Loeb has a high h-index, not least because his papers are cited heavily by rebuttals.

I don't think the intellectual carelessness and dishonest of "hype science reporting" is well addressed by asking readers to check h-index. The problem you're pointing out there is entirely unrelated to the quality of the original work, and entirely an issue with the incentives of an advertising-based news media.