Hi, I generally have a rule where I don’t respond to comments that are longer than the blog post on which they are commenting but you seem nice. I’m not entirely sure if I’m the right person to ask for advice, if that’s what you’re asking. I should have made this clearer up-top, I’m a social scientist, I mostly study risk perception and trust in information. I currently study how people think about vaccination but I could easily be studying how they think about seatbelts, pensions or meat consumption.
As such, I defer my judgements about the safety and efficacy of vaccines to those that have the appropriate expertise. Vaccination is a truly massive area of study, while it’s clear that you have read a lot, your review of 1000 papers will barely scratch the surface of the available literature. From an estimate I read recently there are around 3000 new vaccine related papers published each year [1]. I also worry that seeing as you go back to 1915 there may well be papers in there from outdated research paradigms and as such you may run into positive hypothesis testing (being drawn to the information that supports a theory and not giving equal weight to information that refutes it). If you’re intending to write as a historian that’s obviously fine (although context would have to be made exceptionally clear), however to apply many of the papers published before, say, 1980 to modern vaccination practices would likely be misleading.
My advice, if that’s something you’d like, would be to focus your search down to meta-analysis’s and systematic reviews rather than potentially outdated research. There are individuals that spend an entire lifetime working on the tiniest of aspects related to vaccination, nobody has the time to know it all. Therefore, we distributed knowledge across many experts and combine findings into meta-analysis’s and systematic reviews through a rigorous process where we make sure to capture every angle. As such, it can sluggish for the system to change however, it is a highly accurate process in the long run.
[1] Portsmouth, D. (2012). Identifying appropriate journals in which to publish original research on vaccines against human infectious diseases. Medical Writing, 21(1), 26-35.
RE: I’m doing a PhD, and it’s literally (i.e. figuratively) the only thing I talk about…