Was there a boy?

Abstract

The editors of the journal created a new section - “Handling errors” - and commissioned me to analyze the text of the article “Thyroid function in women of childbearing age from the Kazakhstan part of the Aral Sea region”, published in the same issue. The need for such a rubric is dictated by the obvious fact that the editors constantly receive inadequate quality manuscripts from the authors. Some of them are so much deviating from journal’s standard that they quickly fly to the "basket". Others have serious flaws in the methodology, analysis or discussion of the results. But they can potentially be brought to an acceptable level, although, sometimes, the initial mistakes in the design of the study make this extremely difficult. The review discusses shortcomings of the work: the absence of a control group and the fact that the authors tried to study the effect on the thyroid gland of unidentified chemical agents in an unknown concentration. Due to the mistakes made during the planning process, the data obtained, no matter how reliable and unique they were, became impossible to interpret.