Your questions seem to err on the side of researchers not doing good research. Why is that?
Experience in reading the peer-reviewed medical research literature since the 1970s. It used to be that one had to go to an actual biomedical library, as I have done on many occasions, and look up the articles through journal indexes and then walk to the shelf where the journals are kept. That still works, but now many of us also do online searches. Peter Norvig's article
still has some "citation needed" notes up by some factual claims, and some very old journals cited for some of the claims that do have citations. Because I had recently read
about reviews of the actual effectiveness of one prescribed medicine that supposedly helps cognitive deficits, I was particularly interested in this thread to see what citations there are for recent, replicated research with proper protocol that back up the drugs most discussed in this thread. (I figured that anyone taking those drugs to good effect would readily remember the citations.) Over the decades, I've seen different kinds of smart drugs come and go out of vogue. Eventually, every use of smart drugs needs to ask, "What smart things are people who take this drug doing that aren't being done by people who don't take the drug?" People in the business of selling drugs have a lot of incentive to obscure the basic question of drug effectiveness in the interest of appealing to drug-buyers' hopes, which is why I request especially cogent evidence for claims such as those made about the drugs discussed in this thread.
"is a good reminder that just getting into a peer-reviewed journal doesn't always establish that the published conclusion is correct (or important)."
Which science school did you go to? Science is about the body of evidence, not an individual study. It's about understanding mechanisms, gradually iterating between induction and retroduction to uncover new hypotheses then prove a mechanism over time. It's about gradually building up an argument over many years of research across the field, not any one individual study.
I agree that we need to be careful in interpreting studies (I am a statistician, I should know), but your stance from ignorance adds nothing to the conversation, and in a worst case scenario belittles the efforts of an entire field that you no nothing about, but are biased against all the research you haven't even read from the outset.
Experience in reading the peer-reviewed medical research literature since the 1970s. It used to be that one had to go to an actual biomedical library, as I have done on many occasions, and look up the articles through journal indexes and then walk to the shelf where the journals are kept. That still works, but now many of us also do online searches. Peter Norvig's article
http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
is a good reminder that just getting into a peer-reviewed journal doesn't always establish that the published conclusion is correct (or important).
I see the Wikipedia article on piracetam
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracetam
still has some "citation needed" notes up by some factual claims, and some very old journals cited for some of the claims that do have citations. Because I had recently read
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=3534
about reviews of the actual effectiveness of one prescribed medicine that supposedly helps cognitive deficits, I was particularly interested in this thread to see what citations there are for recent, replicated research with proper protocol that back up the drugs most discussed in this thread. (I figured that anyone taking those drugs to good effect would readily remember the citations.) Over the decades, I've seen different kinds of smart drugs come and go out of vogue. Eventually, every use of smart drugs needs to ask, "What smart things are people who take this drug doing that aren't being done by people who don't take the drug?" People in the business of selling drugs have a lot of incentive to obscure the basic question of drug effectiveness in the interest of appealing to drug-buyers' hopes, which is why I request especially cogent evidence for claims such as those made about the drugs discussed in this thread.