Retractions and Corrections From Scientific Misconduct

An interesting article appears in the Journal of Medical Ethics, January 2013, vol. 39, pp. 46-50, titled “Scientific retractions and corrections related to misconduct findings,” by David B Resnik and Gregg E Dinse. The authors explored 208 closed cases involving official findings of research misconduct published by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity from 1992 to 2011 in order to determine how often scientists mention in a retraction or correction notice that there was an ethical problem with the article. The issue of fraudulent articles appear in the scientific literature is a problem as many articles and the data within them can be falsified. See for example Industry Bias in Biomedical Science and The Right to Health and Information. The authors mention that typically when a retraction or correction is made to an article they are usually electronically linked to … Read more

The Political Interests of the Media

An interesting article appears in the Journal of Medical Ethics, December 2012, vol. 38, pp. 768-770, titled “Medicine, the media and political interests,” by Wendy Lipworth, Ian Kerridge, Bronwen Morrell, Catriona Bonfiglioli, and Rowena Forsyth. The authors mention how the news media is often criticized for failing to support the goals of government health programs. The authors mention a statement in the American Journal of Public Health “(i)nadequate, misleading or incomplete news reporting constitutes a public health threat. Such reporting can lead people to make misguided choices that may put their health at risk or influence policymakers to adopt inadequate or harmful laws, regulations, or policies.” Some have even argued that the media should consider it’s health functions to be more important than it’s other functions. The authors state “News journalism prides itself on providing a public service as a … Read more

Are Your Search Results All From the Same Company or Person?

Search engine marketing refers to using certain practices to boost your website’s search result position in search engines like Google and Bing. Nowadays a new strategy has emerged that people are using by using microsites and having several different domains. For example this is discussed in several posts over at Modern Dental Marketing see for example http://moderndentalmarketing.com/2013/05/faqs-about-dental-blogs/ as a strategy that they use to improve the ranking of their clients website. In this post Shauna Duty (author on May 7, 2013) says “At MDPM Dental, we’ve been creating blogs that act as microsites for three years now! Some of our client dentists hold 70-90% of the page-one Google real estate for a keyword phrase. Generally, Google shows 10 organic listings on page one, so I’m saying that some of our clients have 7-9 listings on a page one search result.” … Read more

The Search Engine Battle: Are you Paying Attention?

For those who may read Modern Dental Marketing you may have seen a post in September 2013 titled “SEO Warfare: A Strategic Plan for Dentists” (edit: this article is now no longer live). If you don’t read the blog, I encourage you to read that post and make a note of a key change brewing in the search engine battle. Just a short year or two ago, Google used to be mostly the game in town. Google used to control over 90% of the search market for the PC and mobile. Nowadays that number has gone down a lot. As of October 2013, Google controls 66.9% of the market, Bing controls 18.1% of the market, and Yahoo controls 11.1% of the market with Ask and AOL both also having a very small stake (see October Search Market Share: Bing Continues … Read more