Dozens of hilarious details about Valkee Ltd’s HumanCharger scam go untold because they don’t warrant a full blog post. As a present for Christmas Day, here’s the best of all.
The Valkee “research” group has published a number of trial results in unfavorable ways:
- The 13-persons pilot trial in the science humour journal Medical Hypotheses;
- A fMRI trial allegedly showing brain response to light in the blacklisted World Journal of Neuroscience, a well-known dump site for academically toxic waste;
- a placebo-controlled trial which showed the earlight device to be a placebo, with falsified results in BMC Psychiatry, with the reviewers failing to notice.
The only positive trial with evidence value for Valkee in a scientific journal was the one with the 22 ice hockey players supposedly pimped by earlight to better reaction, published in Frontiers in Physiology.
I say it was, because it had been until now.
It is a real pleasure for me to tell you, that this very special journal series was officially elevated to junk status, by Scholarly Open Access. That’s the No.#1 authority. The list is used by, for example, finnish universities to determine the standing of a publication.
With it, a second Valkee study goes down the tube, which is no longer on their website. It was in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience.
The decision was overdue: The fake peer-review was obvious in the ice hockey article, where one of the authors was among the editors, and a dance instructor with no idea was assigned to review it by her lab boss. That’s not a fluke. It’s systematic pseudoscience done by Frontiers.
Is there anything left of Valkee’s evidence, among the ruins?
According to usually well-informed sources, there is one final blow still coming.
A nice Christmas to all and a Happy New Year!