Come on you guys. At this end of the market being able to spot fake news about trial results should be considered a basic survival skill.
Has anyone tried to find this paper? Lets see how we go.
The paper was published in the journal “Pharmacy and Pharmacology”. Go to the website “Journal of Pharmacy and Pharmacology”
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/20427158
The journal says it is an official journal of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, and one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical sciences journals. This sounds very impressive but these days it pays to be careful. So do a background check on the journal through the Scimago rankngs website:
https://www.scimagojr.com/journalsearch.php?q=23102&tip=sid
This shows the journal has a very good H index and is in the top quartile Q1 of journals in its field. So it is very good journal.
Go back to the “Journal of Pharmacy and Pharmacology” and try and find the paper. Its not there. There is no zolpimist paper in the “Journal of Pharmacy and Pharmacology”.
The zolpimist paper is actually in the journal “Pharmacy and Pharmacology”.
https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=94116
Now run your Scimago background check on this journal and see what happens.
https://www.scimagojr.com/journalsearch.php?q=Pharmacy and Pharmacology
It doesn’t exist in Scimago. Scimargo only ranks journals that are indexed in Scopus. And in order to get indexed into Scopus journals have to pass a quality test. In this way Scopus acts as the first line of defence stopping junk science penetrating into real science.
So who exactly is the publisher of the journal “Pharmacy and Pharmacology”. The publisher is “Scientific Research - an academic publisher”. A vanity press, predatory publisher.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Research_Publishing
Do a bit of googling on Scientific Research Publishing if you don’t trust Wikipedia.
So the zolpimist paper is in a junk science journal. How come? Look at the quality of the paper.
The elements of a paper reporting trial results in legitimate journals are closely prescribed. Not by the journal but because journals have adopted what are known as the CONSORT standards for trial reporting.
Its very simple – if you haven’t complied with these standards you won’t get published (except in a junk science journal).
Lets take a couple of very basic CONSORT elements that must be reported. The trial registration ID, when the trial took place, the Ethics committee that approved the trial, where it took place and who conducted it. Have a look at the zolimist paper and these elements are missing.
It’s curious isn’t it? The elements that enable you to establish the provenance of the trial are missing. The whole thing looks fake.
But then I had a vague recollection that I had seen this trial somewhere before. And blow me down … this is the trial from years ago that Novadel conducted somewhere in Russia that the FDA found was full of data discrepancies and falsifications. Study 003.
So what exactly have AYTU done here? AYTU claim to have done a post-hoc analysis of this study. But the paper says nothing about anything post-hoc or what is new at all. The claims made in the paper about faster onset on sleep from zolpimist were considered by the FDA from its original analysis of this study and rejected.
Nowhere do AYTU state that on that on the basis of these "fake" new results from the post-hoc analysis will they go back to the FDA to seek to add a clinical efficacy benefit claim to enable them to market on this.
There you have it - fake news about trial results. It won’t fool anyone …. well except you guys it seems.
(20min delay)