My Methods

It occurs to me that, if I were reading this blog instead of writing it, I would wonder, "how is this guy finding these studies and choosing which to blog about? And what isn't he telling me?" And these are good questions, worth asking of anyone who claims to be any kind of knowledgeable. So I thought it'd be worth going into my methods for this blog a little.

I started out by going to PubMed and searching for "vaccine", then saving all of the results as far back as they went, so far up to 1940. Each time I completed a decade of studies, I could go to PubMed for another. I save these studies in my favorite reference software, Zotero.

This method of searching is likely to miss out on a great deal, if not the majority, of potentially interesting studies: those that don't have "vaccine" in the title, for example, but instead say "immunization" or whatever. For this reason, I also gather studies from other sources on the web: pro-vaccine ones, like Science-Based Medicine, I Speak of Dreams, or this one; and also, perhaps more especially, anti-vaccine ones, like IMCV (now there's a place where it's important to ask yourself the questions mentioned above!). I also look at what the scientific journal Vaccine puts out, to see what's going on in that field.

And finally, for each study I blog, using Web of Science, I look up all the later studies that cite that study and save them, as well as any interesting studies cited by the blogged study. This helps give me an idea of what later scientists thought of the studies I'm reading, and also broadens my net to catch things that I might not otherwise encounter. With these methods, I've accumulated more than 2,000 articles I might someday blog about, and I'm sure I'll find many more as time passes.

How I Choose
You might've noticed that I don't blog about every study I've found. Part of this is practical: it takes a while to write a blog post, and I have a lot of other stuff going on.

The other part is that a lot of the studies just aren't that relevant to my purpose. I want to research vaccines' safety and effectiveness, and a lot of studies I've found are about basic bacteriology or virology, methods or vaccines that have been abandoned to history and thus aren't relevant today, or just don't add anything new to what I've already blogged about. For example, almost 400 articles cited reference 1 in 040, but the majority of those are about an experimental form of multiple sclerosis in animals, not very related to vaccine safety or effectiveness. So those I put aside.

I try to be careful not to be dismissive of articles that seem to show some problems with vaccines; I hope that's apparent. Those are the ones most likely to be interesting (aside from large, well-done trials of safety and efficacy, of course), so I give them some priority. So my goal for the answer to the question, "what isn't he telling me" is "not much."

I must reiterate, though, that I'm not an expert on this subject, so instead of telling you what is true, I'm trying to show you where to find that information. If anyone wants the full list of my references, blogged or not, shoot me an email and I'd be happy to share.