For this reason PubMed should be used as a normal search engine in the medical field. It is up to those who read understand the value of what they read.
It is therefore necessary that those who do research by non-professionals are cautious and contextualised, not to find themselves having to discuss things like (really happened): "The important study that demonstrates the effectiveness of rosemary in the treatment of cancer has been accepted from PubMed and this proves.
Great care must therefore be taken: many believe that a search that appears on PubMed is automatically reliable or important. This is not the case, as on a normal search engine there is no selection based on the correctness or importance of the study, there is everything, it is up to those who try to be able to select the results.
The only selection is made on the sources: scientific magazines appear almost all over the world that meet the "minimum" criteria of fairness but, for example, not all have a critical review made by readers who are usually authorities in that field of research.
Basically the selection criteria for the articles are: none! PubMed is limited to "register" the "indexed" articles that have a minimum of diffusion. Accordingly, we find the articles of Lancet (a magazine considered to be of high authority) as well as of Minerva Stomatologica (an Italian journal of dentistry that does not have a particularly high reputation).
An example? The study on Santa Claus that can be found at the link "Here comes Santa Claus": what is the evidence? concludes with: "Although the evidence confirms the existence of Santa Claus, it can be concluded that the most real thing is that nobody, neither children nor adults, can see it ".
Allego "Introspection" 98x128x5 cm
Lorenzo Mignani
Author: Lorenzo Mignani