I have written about ‘EVIDENCE BASED COMPLEMENTARY AND ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE’ (EBCAM), on of the leading alt med journals before (for instance here and here). To my embarrassment, I must admit to having been a member of its founding editorial-board; but I left when things started looking suspicious. In the latter post, I pointed out that:
- The peer-review system of EBCAM is farcical: potential authors who send their submissions to EBCAM are invited to suggest their preferred reviewers who subsequently are almost invariably appointed to do the job. It goes without saying that such a system is prone to all sorts of serious failures; in fact, this is not peer-review at all, in my opinion, it is an unethical sham.
- As a result, most (I estimate around 80%) of the articles that currently get published on alternative medicine are useless rubbish. They tend to be either pre-clinical investigations which never get followed up and are thus meaningless, or surveys of no relevance whatsoever, or pilot studies that never are succeeded by more definitive trials, or non-systematic reviews that are wide open to bias and can only mislead the reader.
Strong words? Yes, ‘useless rubbish’ is not exactly meant as a compliment. Perhaps you want to judge for yourself – here are the last 20 articles published in EBCAM in 2015:
Kathy Lee SM, Yoon KH, Park J, Kim HS, Woo JS, Lee SR, Lee KH, Jang HH, Kim JB, Kim WS, Lee S, Kim W.
Evid Based Complement Alternat Med. 2015;2015:625645. doi: 10.1155/2015/625645. Epub 2016 Jan 11.
- PMID:
- 26881000
Azmi NH, Ismail M, Ismail N, Imam MU, Alitheen NB, Abdullah MA.
Evid Based Complement Alternat Med. 2015;2015:153684. doi: 10.1155/2015/153684. Epub 2015 Dec 22.
- PMID:
- 26858770
Scientific Evidence for Korean Medicine and Its Integrative Medical Research.
Park W, Mollahaliloglu S, Linnik V, Chae H.
Evid Based Complement Alternat Med. 2015;2015:967087. doi: 10.1155/2015/967087. Epub 2015 Dec 30. No abstract available.
- PMID:
- 26843887
Acupuncture for Lateral Epicondylitis: A Systematic Review.
Tang H, Fan H, Chen J, Yang M, Yi X, Dai G, Chen J, Tang L, Rong H, Wu J, Liang F.
Evid Based Complement Alternat Med. 2015;2015:861849. doi: 10.1155/2015/861849. Epub 2015 Dec 30. Review.
- PMID:
- 26843886
Li M, Han Z, Bei W, Rong X, Guo J, Hu X.
Evid Based Complement Alternat Med. 2015;2015:643102. doi: 10.1155/2015/643102. Epub 2015 Dec 30.
- PMID:
- 26843885
Silva FC, de Souza JG, Reichert AM, Antonangelo RP, Suzuki R, Itinose AM, Marek CB.
Evid Based Complement Alternat Med. 2015;2015:762373. doi: 10.1155/2015/762373. Epub 2015 Dec 28.
- PMID:
- 26823673
Hou PW, Hsu HC, Lin YW, Tang NY, Cheng CY, Hsieh CL.
Evid Based Complement Alternat Med. 2015;2015:495684. doi: 10.1155/2015/495684. Epub 2015 Dec 28. Review.
- PMID:
- 26823672
Antibacterial and Cytotoxic Activity of Compounds Isolated from Flourensia oolepis.
Joray MB, Trucco LD, González ML, Napal GN, Palacios SM, Bocco JL, Carpinella MC.
Evid Based Complement Alternat Med. 2015;2015:912484. doi: 10.1155/2015/912484. Epub 2015 Dec 27.
- PMID:
- 26819623
Wei Y, Ma LX, Yin SJ, An J, Wei Q, Yang JX.
Evid Based Complement Alternat Med. 2015;2015:878164. doi: 10.1155/2015/878164. Epub 2015 Dec 27. Review.
- PMID:
- 26819622
The Role of CAM in Public Health, Disease Prevention, and Health Promotion.
Hawk C, Adams J, Hartvigsen J.
Evid Based Complement Alternat Med. 2015;2015:528487. doi: 10.1155/2015/528487. Epub 2015 Dec 24. No abstract available.
- PMID:
- 26819621
Yangjing Capsule Ameliorates Spermatogenesis in Male Mice Exposed to Cyclophosphamide.
Zhao H, Jin B, Zhang X, Cui Y, Sun D, Gao C, Gu Y, Cai B.
Evid Based Complement Alternat Med. 2015;2015:980583. doi: 10.1155/2015/980583. Epub 2015 Dec 21.
- PMID:
- 26798404
Singsai K, Akaravichien T, Kukongviriyapan V, Sattayasai J.
Evid Based Complement Alternat Med. 2015;2015:970354. doi: 10.1155/2015/970354. Epub 2015 Dec 21.
- PMID:
- 26798403
Chung HS, Hwang I, Oh KJ, Lee MN, Park K.
Evid Based Complement Alternat Med. 2015;2015:913158. doi: 10.1155/2015/913158. Epub 2015 Dec 22.
- PMID:
- 26798402
Liu X, Kanthimathi MS, Heese K.
Evid Based Complement Alternat Med. 2015;2015:828159. doi: 10.1155/2015/828159. Epub 2015 Dec 22. No abstract available.
- PMID:
- 26798401
The Consumption of Bicarbonate-Rich Mineral Water Improves Glycemic Control.
Murakami S, Goto Y, Ito K, Hayasaka S, Kurihara S, Soga T, Tomita M, Fukuda S.
Evid Based Complement Alternat Med. 2015;2015:824395. doi: 10.1155/2015/824395. Epub 2015 Dec 21.
- PMID:
- 26798400
Xuejuan Z, Jietao Z, Di H, Yu Z, Xiaozi G, Yunfa L, Lihua D.
Evid Based Complement Alternat Med. 2015;2015:527219. doi: 10.1155/2015/527219. Epub 2015 Dec 22.
- PMID:
- 26798399
Mindfulness-Based Intervention for Adolescents with Recurrent Headaches: A Pilot Feasibility Study.
Hesse T, Holmes LG, Kennedy-Overfelt V, Kerr LM, Giles LL.
Evid Based Complement Alternat Med. 2015;2015:508958. doi: 10.1155/2015/508958. Epub 2015 Dec 22.
- PMID:
- 26798398
Mao S, Li C.
Evid Based Complement Alternat Med. 2015;2015:349721. doi: 10.1155/2015/349721. Epub 2015 Dec 22.
- PMID:
- 26798397
Shen CC, Yang YC, Chiao MT, Chan SC, Liu BS.
Evid Based Complement Alternat Med. 2015;2015:278951. doi: 10.1155/2015/278951. Epub 2015 Dec 21.
- PMID:
- 26798396
Mohd Sairazi NS, Sirajudeen KN, Asari MA, Muzaimi M, Mummedy S, Sulaiman SA.
Evid Based Complement Alternat Med. 2015;2015:972623. doi: 10.1155/2015/972623. Epub 2015 Dec 17. Review.
- PMID:
- 26793262
I think the above estimation that 20% of ECAM’s articles are not rubbish cannot be that far from the truth.
But this is not what puzzles me most about ECAM. What I fail to understand is why so many researchers send their papers to this journal. In 2015, EBCAM published just under 1000 (983 to be exact) papers. This is not far from half of all Medline-listed articles on alternative medicine (2056 in total).
To appreciate these figures – and this is where it gets not just puzzling but intriguing, in my view – we need to know that EBCAM charges a publication fee of US$ 2500. That means the journal has an income of about US$ 2 500 000 per annum!
The figure is, of course, not quite as high as that because EBCAM waives charges for authors from countries classified by the World Bank as Low-income economies or Lower-middle-income economies as of July 2015, and which have a 2014 gross domestic product of less than 200 billion US dollars. But the total amount cannot be far from US$ 2 million per year.
Now, such affluence might, of course, be good news. The journal could, for instance, put large amounts of money into alt med research. We all know that, in alt med, research funds are scarce, and that support would therefore be most welcome. Alas, I could not find any trace of such charitable activity.
GOOD REASONS TO BE PUZZLED, I THINK.
12 Responses to EBCAM: an alt med journal that puzzles me a great deal
Leave a Reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
It us hard to see why this journal is even indexed. Its publication practices appear to meet the standard definition of predatory.
Just the titles of the articles alone are frighteningly funny/funnily frightening. A desperate attempt to use gobbledygook in an attempt to look all ‘science-y’ and that. A bit like the way charlatans use ‘quantum’ as an ornament, as in a book available on Amazon titled ‘Quantum Psychophysics’.
It’s also interesting to note that the cost of subscribing to EBCAM is the second highest of all their 364 publications: the highest is BioMed Research International at $6,999, with EBCAM coming in at $3,195 per annum. Most of their other publications are just a few hundred dollars per annum.
It should be noted that the excellent (and properly peer-reviewed) Focus on Alternative and Complementary Therapies, edited by Prof Ernst, costs a mere £114 with print and online access and does not charge authors a publication fee.
The publishers of EBCAM, Hindawi, claim that it has an acceptance rate of 29%. I’ll leave readers to contemplate the quality of the 71%.
Prof Ernst is clearly missing a trick: he should be charging £114 for his peer-reviewed edition, and £1140 for one without.
LOL! If only he had no scruples…
Call me biased, but over the years I have learned to regard any journal published by Hindawi as suspicious.
Your 80% estimate appears low.
Dear Edzard Ernst,
regarding to point number 1, the possibility of suggesting reviewers is not common on other fields of mainstream medicine as well?
I’ve submitted papers to journals in the field of rheumatology. In all cases, the journal offered the possibility of not only suggesting reviewers, but also to “suggest against” reviwers too. However, it’s true that in the end I wouldn’t know who had reviewed the paper.
true, but most other journals then send it to independent reviewers; they ask for potential reviewers because they want to increase their lists of potential reviewers, I think [but I am not entirely sure]
It seems pretty shameful that animals are used for this useless research. (I.E. the first linked article).