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Survey Statistics: random sampling is not leaving Kevin Gray pointed me to this everyday, run-of-the-mill, bread-and-butter bit of junk science, “Association between the screen time spent watching short videos at bedtime and essential hypertension in young and middle-aged people: a cross-sectional study.”

I heard once that doctors at many institutions are required to publish research papers as part of their professional advancement, and so it stands to reason that there will be millions of trash papers floating around. This one is bad, but not especially bad. If it were a student project, I’d just tell them to remove or qualify the causal language and to plot the raw data. As a contribution to the medical literature, I guess the paper has no value, but I also assume that contributing to the medical literature is not really the point, that it’s some sort of professional qualification exercise.

Anyway, it’s no big deal, just something that someone emailed to me, and I have no idea how he came across it. It’s not like anyone would ever hear about it, right?

Ummm, how exactly did my correspondent hear about this paper? Let me do a quick google news search:

Oh, shoot, it actually did get some press . . . that’s unfortunate.

It was also promoted by the publisher of the journal:

Here’s the journal’s webpage:

And this brings us to the subject of today’s post, which is not that silly article but rather its branding.

The journal is called BMC Public Health. BMC stands for BioMed Central, who describe themselves as “the pioneers of open access publishing.” They’re part of “Springer Nature.” I guess the way this works is that Springer paid for the Nature brand name, or something like that. Springer has the money, Nature has the reputation, so it’s a natural exchange.

As I’ve said before, reputation is a two-way street:

From one direction, Nature has that reputation, which rubs off on Springer Nature, which in turn lends credibility to journals such as BMC Public Health which use the Springer Nature branding, which in turn lends credibility to papers like “Association between the screen time spent watching short videos at bedtime and essential hypertension in young and middle-aged people: a cross-sectional study,” which in turn gets them into the press and into the hands of my correspondent.

From the other direction, we see a useless paper in a journal with the Nature brand, and this makes me respect things published in Nature a little bit less. Fair enough; Nature made money by selling their name, and nothing comes for free.

As with Matt Damon, Larry David, and LeBron James (all notorious for making money from endorsing a financial scam), so with Nature.