Tracing a claim back to the study it came from

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A claim worth checking usually arrives with a fragment of its origin attached: a compound name, an outcome, sometimes a year or an author.

Start from the claim, not the search box

A claim worth checking usually arrives with a fragment of its origin attached: a compound name, an outcome, sometimes a year or an author. Those fragments are the search. Typing the marketing sentence into a general search engine returns pages that repeat it; typing the compound and the outcome into a biomedical index returns the literature it was drawn from, or shows that there is none. The difference between those two results is the whole exercise.

PubMed indexes the abstract, not the paper

PubMed is a catalogue of biomedical citations maintained by the US National Library of Medicine. A record there gives the title, the authors, the journal, the date and the abstract. It is not the paper. The abstract is written by the authors to summarise their own work and routinely states a conclusion the data supports more weakly than the wording suggests. Reading the abstract and stopping is the most common way to be misled by a real study.

The identifiers that make a claim checkable

Every PubMed record has a PMID, an integer. Most papers also carry a DOI, a permanent identifier that resolves to the publisher's copy. A claim that cites either can be checked by anyone in under a minute. A claim that cites a journal name and a year, with no identifier, is asking to be taken on trust -- and in the overwhelming majority of cases nobody follows it up, which is why that style of citation survives.

What to do when the paper is paywalled

A paywalled paper is not a dead end. PubMed Central holds free full text for work funded by several public bodies. Many authors post an accepted manuscript to an institutional repository. The abstract plus the methods section is often enough to answer the only question that matters here: what was actually measured, in what, and how many times.

Human, animal, or cell culture

The single most important line in a methods section is what the study was done in. A result in cultured cells is a result about cells. A result in rodents is a result about rodents. Neither becomes a result about people by being repeated. Vendor copy very often collapses this distinction silently, not by lying but by omitting the model, and the omission is doing the work.

Reviews, meta-analyses and where they sit

A systematic review gathers the studies on a question and assesses them against stated criteria; a meta-analysis pools their numbers. Both sit above any single study in usefulness, and both inherit the weaknesses of what they pooled -- a meta-analysis of six small, poorly controlled trials is a precise summary of six small, poorly controlled trials. The inclusion criteria, usually a short paragraph in the methods, are where the real judgement of such a paper lives.

When the trail ends in nothing

Sometimes the search returns no study at all, or returns one that says something materially different from the claim. That is a finding, and it is the finding this exercise exists to produce. A claim with no traceable source is not thereby false; it is unsupported, which is a different and more useful thing to know.

Where to check this independently

The claims on this page about tracing a claim back to the study it came from can be checked against sources outside this site:

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