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RE: That sure cleared it up...not
I guess we will just have to agree to disagree then, because as you put it, your target audience is of higher mental capacity, and I, a member of said group, find the article lacking an essential/critical element in it's composition. I agree that you put a lot of time/effort into researching your references, all the more reason for you to have commented on the nature of the experiments and the intended goals/conclusions of the researchers. What you have done is provided some references, categorized them, and displayed results without giving the reader any reason to trust your references. That's my point, you did yourself a disservice as well as the reader. This is an issue of polishing a summary.
The average Joe isn't interested in context or experimental design; he is completely satisfied with hearing (and likely accepting) "studies show epidurals can be dangerous" on his local news.
And you have done pretty much what most news organizations do, you present some results without context for people to interrupt them. And yes the local news provides references too, usually from PubMed or someother journal. Although, come to think of it, they usually describe the study.
My article is not a peer-reviewed publication
No, but someone reviewed it to be posted on Omninerd and that someone obviously thought well Brandon must know what he is talking about and since he provided references I don't need to question validity. Again, I'm not saying that the chosen articles are bad, but merely questioning the decision not to include a summary of the experiments so as to allow others to better weigh the facts.
..serves its purpose: to provide those like me who want to know more with a convenient bridge from the everyday Google world to the academic world.
But to draw any reasonable conclusions from your article without said summaries, the reader must check each of the sources him or herself. In essence you provided us with a list of your google scholar search results...albeit a little more tabular. But at least google scholar provides an abstract by which one can access the validity before clicking on the reference.
The reader, such as yourself, looking for more context can move to the next step up: reading the cited studies' abstracts.
This sums up my entire critique, with out an abstract/summary of the experimental goals the results are meaningless. They don't mean a thing if I don't know how/why they were obtained. Context is needed in everything be they peer-reviewed or not. You are passing along results without giving anyone the slightest idea of how they were obtained...you have vouched for them, and I don't think obstetrics is exactly your field of expertise. Maybe a Dr. could get away with out providing context, though he shouldn't, but why should you? Because you searched around for a couple of hours?
My question to you Brandon, is do you know what the experimental goals/methods of your references, or did you pull numbers from an abstract. You have given the reader no reason to suspect that your references are valid at all.
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RE: That sure cleared it up...not
I can understand how the average Joe would have issues here, but he's not my intended audience - and rightly so, as Joe Schmoe would probably punch his monitor or browse to his favorite adult site before getting halfway through. The average Joe isn't interested in context or experimental design; he is completely satisfied with hearing (and likely accepting) "studies show epidurals can be dangerous" on his local news.
Others, however, want to know more. So, where do they go? If they were like me a couple of years ago, they'd spend hours trying to pick the best of search engine results. As I learned in the discussion following my soy milk article, however, there are better sources - more particularly, PubMed and the like. This article takes advantage of hours spent perusing and organizing PubMed results for recent research applicable to my topic: the pros and cons of epidural analgesia in labor/childbirth.
Those who want to know more now have the ability to access a good number of directly relevant studies - organized by year and with succinct results/conclusions presented - in minutes, rather than hours. The reader, such as yourself, looking for more context can move to the next step up: reading the cited studies' abstracts. Want even more? Read the studies in their entirety. Even more? Read the related studies (nicely listed on the cited websites).
My article is not a peer-reviewed publication (as this is not an academic journal), but it is coherent, organized, and serves its purpose: to provide those like me who want to know more with a convenient bridge from the everyday Google world to the academic world.
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