One of our goals here at SBM is to do more than just blog about the issues of science and pseudoscience in medicine that are our raison d’être. We also want to publish our science-based critiques in the peer-reviewed medical literature. Our first crack at this was an article by Steve Novella and myself published last month in Trends In Molecular Medicine entitled “Clinical trials of integrative medicine: testing whether magic works?” Even better, thanks to a press release and how the editors made the article free to all, it garnered more social media attention than any article previously published in TMM, and the editor has informed me that it “shot straight to the top of TMM’s ‘Most read’ article list and I anticipate it staying there for quite some time.” For this, Steve and I thank you, our readers, and those of you who spread the news. We’re hoping that this success garners more offers to write review and commentary articles for the peer-reviewed literature about topics near and dear to us.
Now, I’m happy to announce another commentary in the peer-reviewed literature. It’s an article I wrote for Nature Reviews Cancer that just appeared online yesterday entitled “Integrative oncology: Really the best of both worlds?” I must say, I’m quite proud of this one, and it is a big deal, hopefully to more people than just me. If you look up the impact factor for NRC, you’ll see it’s around 35, which is between The Lancet and JAMA.
Accessing this article is a little more difficult than accessing the previous one was, but not by that much. Normally, NRC articles are behind a paywall. In this case, my article is not behind a paywall, which is unusual, nor does it require a subscription to NRC or any Nature journal to be accessed. It does, however, require registration of a Nature.com login, which can be obtained for free, at, yes, Nature.com. Yes, I know it’s a bit of a pain and that many of you won’t want to register yet another login, but I assure you it will be worth it. Not only do you get access to my article, but there’s a lot of other cool science stuff at Nature even for free. That’s why I hope that a lot of you will do it and download the article. Read it, learn from it, and, hopefully, enjoy it. Let’s see if we can do it again and make this the most accessed article in NRC history.
Finally, consider this the comments section for the article. Therein lies another advantage of having access to a well-trafficked blog.