‘Lazy’ authors? One in six scientific papers mischaracterize work they cite
Saturday, July 19, 2025 - 00:51
in Health & Medicine
In 1980, The New England Journal of Medicine ( NEJM ) published a five-sentence letter indicating the risk of opioid addiction was low when the drugs were prescribed for chronic pain. During the next 25 years, hundreds of scholarly articles cited the letter —in many cases overgeneralizing or omitting key details, potentially helping drive overprescription of opioids in the 1990s and contributing to the ensuing wave of overdose deaths, a 2017 analysis found. The episode offers an extreme example of scholars incorrectly describing findings they...