As it turns out, this paper "discovered" a method to:
1) determine total area under a curve with precision;
2) calculate area with varied shapes that may or may not intercept on one or both X/Y axes;
3) estimate total area under a curve plotted against varied time intervals (abscissas), whereas other formulas only allow the same time interval; and
4) compare total areas of metabolic curves produced by different studies.
Now, if you have so much as taken some basic calculus at some point in your life, you should realise that all this is actually done using the "trapezoidal rule", one of the basic ideas in calculus and integration.
The paper is relatively old (at least it dates back to an era prior to the massive development of the internet), but I think it is still quite bad that it got through peer review without nobody at Diabetes Care bothering to ask somebody outside their pool of expert reviewers (and with some mathematical skills) to check that the method was actually sound and innovative.
I've checked on the Web of Science (at the MRC Centenary workshop last month, Robin Henderson joked that people use it to check the number of citation of somebody else's papers $-$ but they use Google Scholars to check their own): the paper has 187 citations. What's even worse is that many of these are actually quite recent (as far as earlier this year)!
(I think the story is not new and quite a few people have already commented on it, for example here).
Even more infuriating are the answers from the author, on the tune of "Hey, I did it myself alone, and it's not my fault if no-one thought of publishing before -- and by the way, I don't use trapezes, I use a triangle plus a rectangle." Read it for yourself right there: http://www.math.uconn.edu/~kconrad/math1132s14/handouts/taicomments.pdf
ReplyDelete(PS: Andrew Gelman pointed to the same blog post on his own blog, and the reactions were similar to yours: http://www.andrewgelman.com/2010/12/03/reinventing_the/ )
ReplyDeleteWell, if he did use a triangle + a rectangle, then maybe there really was some novelty in there... ;-)
ReplyDeleteI didn't know about Andrew Gelman's post, but, as I said, I thought this may have been picked up before.