On linking

I make a lot of fuss about the media not linking to scientific papers. So do many other people who write about science.  This isn’t just a weird kink: part of what makes it science is that you can find out what the researchers did and why.

Usually the lack of links is because the journalist doesn’t put them in.  Today, we have two other cases, in sort of opposite directions.

First, the world’s largest ex-parrot. According to a lot of new stories, especially in the UK, there is a newly discovered giant dead parrot from central Otago. It stood a metre high. Some of the more excitable stories claim it was a cannibal, but that seems to be because they have ‘cannibal’ and ‘carnivore’ (or ‘omnivore’) confused.   Many of the stories give a link to a research paper in the Royal Society’s journal Biological Letters. The link doesn’t work. The most likely explanation is that the journal just hasn’t got around to publishing the paper yet, and the link will start working in a day or two.  But it’s still not good science practice or science publishing to deliberately work up news stories about research that isn’t available to read.

Second, there’s a story on Stuff about a company claiming to use epigenetics to personalise health advice.  I say ‘claiming’ because (a) the company doesn’t actually measure any epigenetics, and (b) there isn’t any evidence that I (or the outside expert quoted in the story) know of that says it works to customise health advice using epigenetics.   The health advice is quite likely perfectly sensible and beneficial to its customers. And if a company wants to use head measurements as well as height and weight to say how you should exercise, there’s no real reason they can’t.  It would have been nice to see some question raised on how epigenetics gets involved, though. Here, the lack of any suggestion of links is what raises questions — not so much about the story as about what the company is actually doing.