May 30, 2012

Tracking a press release

The Herald has a story about curcumin, a component of turmeric (which, as you know, is what makes curry stains hard to get rid of).  Apparently it also has some interesting effects on  a component of the immune system. The story appears in quite a few newspapers around the world, and in Science Daily and Medical Daily, which collect this sort of story.

Often it’s hard to tell how much the stories depend just on the press release or whether someone at one of the specialised sites has actually taken a look at the paper.  It’s not hard in this example, though: the paper hasn’t appeared yet.  There seems to be some slipup at the journal. The university press release and all the sites say the paper came out Friday 25th May, but the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry hasn’t gotten to Friday yet: at the time of writing this they are still on Thursday 24 May.

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Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »

Comments

  • avatar
    Michelle Sinclair

    Hi! The June issue, with this article, is currently available through Science Direct. Perhaps the media have access to this also?

    12 years ago

  • avatar

    Seems that article was written by Nicky Park, who today reported on the fact “all kids are psychic” so I think we can ignore the possibility that she actually read the paper. Though, as Michelle says, it is up now: doi: 10.1016/j.jnutbio.2011.02.015

    12 years ago