De logica van de NS met aansluitende treinen : gebruik eens logs van ns.nl!

Ik kan me er zo aan ergeren dat een willekeurige aansluitende trein wordt omgeroepen bij aankomst op een station.

Vanochtend kwam ik aan  met de 8:40 (gepland, hij was iets te laat) IC uit Gouda op Rotterdam CS. Daar werd doodleuk omgeroepen dat om 9:15! de sprinter naar Breda zou vertrekken van spoor 7.

Deze trein is de eerste verbinding naar Lage Zwaluwe en Breda-Prinsenbeek. De overige stations van deze trein worden allemaal door andere treinen sneller bereikt.

Mensen die in Lage Zwaluwe of Breda-Prinsenbeek moeten zijn, zullen vast geen overstap van meer dan 30 minuten inplannen, als je uit Utrecht komt neem je de trein van een half uur later, en als je uit Groningen komt, kun je de trein die een kwartier later aankomt nemen.

Waarom in vredesnaam dan deze omroep! Kan de NS dat zelf niet uit de log van de reisplanner op ns.nl destilleren wat de meest opgevraagde overstap is van deze trein? Dat moet toch beter kunnen.

Editors refuse to link an original article to a reply

A few months ago I wrote a reply to an article that has been published in the Breast. The original authors performed a meta-analysis without a proper search (they only searched PubMed, with very limited keywords, and instead included articles that did not meat the inclusion criteria).

Our reply was published in print before the original article. However, the original article was published with no mention of our reply, nor did the authors respond to our findings.

What followed were numerous e-mails to the editors and journal managers of the journal, to this date with no effect. They keep saying they cannot add a link to our reply to the original article as it has already been published. However, our article was published in print half a year before the original, so they must have had enough time to sort this out.

Replies are always written after the publication of the original article, how else could on opinion be formed? The original article should always be linked to the known replies, and published replies should always be answered by the original authors.

Or am I wrong?

Peer review by BMC gone really bad!

A recent article by Jean-Francois Gehanno et al in BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making already gained a lot of attention, and may I say not in a positive way. The authors found all references from published systematic reviews in Google Scholar, and therefor concluded that 'if the authors of the 29 systematic reviews had used only GS, no reference would have been missed'.

When I investigated this deeper I ran across the peer reviewers' comments, and found out that they were not all that enthousiast either.

The peer review process

I wanted to write a comment to the journal, but other comments had already been sent with equal contents, so I did not do that. But when I investigated the proces a bit more I came across some interesting points in the peer review process.

On the BMC website you can review the prepublication history of this article. One of the reviewers (Miguel García-Pérez) concludes that 'No revision (major, minor, or discretionary) will save this work'. Reviewer number 2 (Henrik von Wehrden) only comments: 'Great job on that short yet highly interesting manuscript'. Of course the authors agree with reviewer von Wehrden and only apply those minor changes that he deems necessary.

The different opinions of the reviewers can be traced back to their background. MA Garcia-Perez has written 8 reviews according to Pubmed, H von Wehrden 0. If you are not experienced in writing systematic reviews how can you have an informed opinion on this topic.

Now what would you expect an editor of the journal to do? If two reviewers so strongly disagree you need to have a third independent opinion. The editors decide to publish this article without further reviewing.

What would a per reviewer with lots of Systematic Review experience be able to tell the editors?

• When searching Google scholar your search is limited to 256 characters. Most searches for systematic reviews are very long and complex and do not fit
• Because you cannot truncate, nor use a controlled vocabulary using google scholar you would need much more word variants than in a regular database, thus exceeding the 256 limits far more easy
• You can only view the first 1000 hits, based on the relevance ranking of scholar
• You cannot export your complete resultset, but only per record.
• You cannot replicate your search, another reviewer might find completely other results
• You cannot be sure what the contents at the search date were because you cannot limit your google scholar search to a certain date.
• etc etc etc

So there's no discussion this paper is not very useful and helpful. In stead: if managers of large academic hospitals read this they might be tempted to drop all budget for expensive search engines, because everyone can find everything in google. Or reviewers might be tempted to only use google scholar for their searches, because eveything is in there.

That would be the only way to test if google scholar can replace all other databases: by performing two systematic reviews at the same time on the same topic: one using all databases that are regularly used, and one using google scholar, and then compare the quality.

So in stead of using only google scholar, we information specialist stick to our primary databases: PubMed, embase, cochrane etc. Only those can give a complete and systematic overview of the literature on a certain topic.