... and other stories.
Research Papers (by author’s first name):
Research papers and general articles are presented in alphabetical order of lead authors’ surnames. For consistency the papers are listed in the manner of references using a style based on the UK’s Open University’s guidelines. When possible the abstract or excerpts from the paper will be given as an aide memoir of the paper’s contents followed by a brief critique from RVM. Following this is a list of links to the abstract and the full text (where available) and below that in some cases will be a set of links to ‘responses’ which are letters to the editor, critiques or discussions of the merits or otherwise of the paper and its use by CAM proponents as evidence.
Homeopaths are in the habit of offloading masses of references in the form of Data Dumps, in the mistaken belief that this is somehow scientific. As an attempt to address this, at least in part a list of such papers has been compiled (the best that they can do) followed by links to the main index with accompanying links and critiques.
A smaller number of papers are cited by homeopaths so frequently they have been given their own section - the ‘usual suspects’. Again, these papers are listed in the
You cannot ignore the majority of available evidence in favour of something you would prefer to be true...
Sir Paul Nurse,
President of the Royal Society
President of the Royal Society
general index with a link to the relevant section where they are examined in more detail.
Media articles of relevance are given a page of their own and are listed under publication name.
I appreciate this classification is somewhat subjective, and there are some inevitable overlaps but it serves the purpose - if anyone has any suggestions as to how to make improvements I would be pleased to hear from you.
All the links to pages above will open in new windows. Once at the page either scroll down or use ctrl-F to search. In the ‘Papers’ sections there are navigation buttons at the top and bottom of the pages.
For consistency and ease of searching I have adopted the increasingly accepted spelling of the word “homeopathy”. Classical purists may bemoan the dropping of the letter “o” from the European version “homoeopathy” but in fact that isn’t the correct way to spell the word either. Originally it was spelled using the ‘lingual tie’ “œ” which was transcribed as plain “e” in the USA and as “oe” in Europe - so they’re both equally wrong!
If anyone is interested in the technical stuff I store the links to and copies of these papers on a USB memory stick using file names which always start with the lead author’s surname followed by the year of publication followed by the title of the paper, abbreviated if necessary to come to less than 100 characters including spaces and suffix. The contents of this stick are then backed up to pretty much any computer I can lay my hands on. To do the backups I used to use Microsoft's 'Briefcase’ programme but that seemed to have difficulty coping with large file numbers so as of July 2011 I switched to the excellent 'AllwaySynch'. The reason for sticking to less than 100 characters was that during the backing-up synchronisation process Briefcase seems to crop any file names that are much larger than 100 characters so the suffixes are lost and you don’t know whether you’re opening a pdf, doc, html file or an internet short-cut - another reason to switch from brifcase obviously, but I will stick to the limit anyway for neatness (some of those titles do ramble!).
It’s a system which took some time to work out (I’m slow like that) but it is consistent and simple. If anyone has any better suggestions I’d love to hear them.
Site Index
Papers claimed as positive evidence:
Homeopaths’ favourite papers:
Media Articles about CAM:
Drop us a line, tell us what you think:
Blogs, web-sites and stuff:
| History of RVM |
| Research |
| General articles |
| Media Articles |
| The Best They Can Do |
| The Usual Suspects |