Beyond disclaimers: the need for a curation-based model of PubMed

Abstract

According to its own description, the biomedical meta-database PubMed exists “with the aim of improving health—both globally and personally.” Unfortunately, PubMed contains an increasing amount of low-quality research that may detract from this goal. Currently, PubMed warns its users and protects itself from such problems with a disclaimer stating that the presence of any article, book, or document in PubMed does not imply an endorsement of, or concurrence with, its contents by the NLM, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), or the U.S. Federal Government. However, we are critical of a “disclaimer-only” stance and encourage PubMed to take further action against low-quality research being found and indexed in its database, and thus available for use. To address this problem, we offer two lines of reasoning to argue that PubMed should not function merely as a passive index of health-related research. Instead, we first argue that only trustworthy published research is able to further PubMed’s goal of health improvement. Secondly, on the basis of surveys, we argue that researchers place a high level of trust in articles that are referenced in this meta-database. We cannot expect any one set of actors to ensure trustworthy content on PubMed, which requires collective responsibility among authors, peer reviewers, editors, and indexers alike. Instead, we propose a curation-based model that incorporates three mechanisms of collaborative content curation: open expert feedback on indexed content, journal auditing, and constant transparent reassessment of indexed entities.

Keywords:

• Accountability
• content curation
• errors
• publishing quality
• responsibility
• transparency

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Transparency

Declaration of funding

This research was not funded. In addition, the authors have not received any individual funding for this research.

Declaration of financial/other relationships

The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties.

Peer reviewers on this manuscript have no relevant financial or other relationships to disclose.

Author contributions

The authors contributed equally to the conceptualization, assessment, writing and editing.

Acknowledgements

There are no acknowledgements.

Notes

i We note that the NLM refers to “PMC’s scientific quality standard”, an elusive standard that is not defined anywhere by the NLM.