Peer review
Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competences as the producers of the work. It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review methods are used to maintain quality standards, improve performance, provide credibility. In academia, scholarly peer review is used to determine an academic paper's suitability for publication. Peer review can be categorized by the type of activity and by the field or profession in which the activity occurs, e.g. medical peer review. Professional peer review focuses on the performance of professionals, with a view to improving quality, upholding standards, or providing certification. In academia, peer review is used to inform in decisions related to faculty tenure. Henry Oldenburg was a British philosopher, seen as the'father' of modern scientific peer review. WA prototype is a professional peer-review process recommended in the Ethics of the Physician written by Ishāq ibn ʻAlī al-Ruhāwī.
He stated that a visiting physician had to make duplicate notes of a patient's condition on every visit. When the patient was cured or had died, the notes of the physician were examined by a local medical council of other physicians, who would decide whether the treatment had met the required standards of medical care. Professional peer review is common in the field of health care, where it is called clinical peer review. Further, since peer review activity is segmented by clinical discipline, there is physician peer review, nursing peer review, dentistry peer review, etc. Many other professional fields have some level of peer review process: accounting, engineering and forest fire management. Peer review is used in education to achieve certain learning objectives as a tool to reach higher order processes in the affective and cognitive domains as defined by Bloom's taxonomy; this may take a variety of forms, including mimicking the scholarly peer review processes used in science and medicine.
Scholarly peer review is the process of subjecting an author's scholarly work, research, or ideas to the scrutiny of others who are experts in the same field, before a paper describing this work is published in a journal, conference proceedings or as a book. The peer review helps the publisher decide whether the work should be accepted, considered acceptable with revisions, or rejected. Peer review requires a community of experts in a given field, who are qualified and able to perform reasonably impartial review. Impartial review of work in less narrowly defined or inter-disciplinary fields, may be difficult to accomplish, the significance of an idea may never be appreciated among its contemporaries. Peer review is considered necessary to academic quality and is used in most major scholarly journals, but it by no means prevents publication of invalid research. Traditionally, peer reviewers have been anonymous, but there is a significant amount of open peer review, where the comments are visible to readers with the identities of the peer reviewers disclosed as well.
The European Union has been using peer review in the "Open Method of Co-ordination" of policies in the fields of active labour market policy since 1999. In 2004, a program of peer reviews started in social inclusion; each program sponsors about eight peer review meetings in each year, in which a "host country" lays a given policy or initiative open to examination by half a dozen other countries and the relevant European-level NGOs. These meet over two days and include visits to local sites where the policy can be seen in operation; the meeting is preceded by the compilation of an expert report on which participating "peer countries" submit comments. The results are published on the web; the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, through UNECE Environmental Performance Reviews, uses peer review, referred to as "peer learning", to evaluate progress made by its member countries in improving their environmental policies. The State of California is the only U. S. state to mandate scientific peer review.
In 1997, the Governor of California signed into law Senate Bill 1320, Chapter 295, statutes of 1997, which mandates that, before any CalEPA Board, Department, or Office adopts a final version of a rule-making, the scientific findings and assumptions on which the proposed rule are based must be submitted for independent external scientific peer review. This requirement is incorporated into the California Health and Safety Code Section 57004. Medical peer review may be distinguished in 4 classifications: 1) clinical peer review. Additionally, "medical peer review" has been used by the American Medical Association to refer not only to the process of improving quality and safety in health care organizations, but to the process of rating clinical behavior or compliance with professional society membership standards. Thus, the terminology has poor standardization and specificity as a database search term. To an outsider, the anonymous, pre-publication peer review process is opaque. Certain journals are accused of not carrying out stringent peer review in order to more expand their customer base in journals where authors pay a fee before public
Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons
Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, colloquially known as P&S and Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, is the graduate professional medical school of Columbia University. Located at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan with its affiliate New York-Presbyterian Hospital. Founded in 1767 by Samuel Bard as the medical department of King's College, the College of Physicians and Surgeons was the first medical school in the thirteen colonies and hence, the United States, to award the Doctor of Medicine degree. Beginning in 1993, P&S was the first U. S. medical school to hold a white coat ceremony. According to U. S. News and World Report, P&S is one of the most selective medical schools in the United States based on average MCAT score, GPA, acceptance rate. In 2011, 6,907 people applied and 1,158 were interviewed for 169 positions in its entering class; the median undergraduate GPA and average MCAT score for successful applicants in 2014 were 3.82 and 36, respectively.
Columbia is ranked 6th among research-oriented medical schools in the United States and ranked 39th for primary care by U. S. News and World Report. In 2016, it ranked 7th in clinical medicine and pharmacy by the Academic Ranking of World Universities; the college has the highest tuition of any private medical school in the United States. Columbia is affiliated with New York-Presbyterian Hospital, the nation's 8th-ranked hospital according to U. S. News & World Report. Beginning in the fall of 2009, the medical school implemented a new curriculum that differed markedly from more traditional structures; the largest change involved a reduction in the number of preclinical months from twenty-four to eighteen and the expansion of the electives and selectives period to fourteen months. Each student now is required to spend four months working on a scholarly project before graduation. Situated on land overlooking the Hudson River and separated from Columbia's undergraduate campus in Morningside Heights by fifty blocks and the neighborhood of Harlem, the Columbia University Medical Center has its own unique standing and identity.
The campus comprises not only P&S, but the College of Dental Medicine, the School of Nursing, the Mailman School of Public Health, the Presbyterian portion of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital and the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Affiliated hospitals include Harlem Hospital, Stamford Hospital in Stamford and Bassett Hospital in Cooperstown, New York. A new, 14-story glass medical education tower is under construction. Housing options on Columbia's Medical Campus include Bard Hall and the Bard-Haven Towers, a complex of three, 31-story apartment buildings overlooking the Hudson River and the George Washington Bridge. Students are guaranteed housing on campus all years, although many students choose to live in other parts of New York City. There are student clubs covering a range of professional and personal interests, all of which fall under the umbrella of the P&S Club. One unusual element is the Bard Hall Players, a theatrical group run by the students of the medical campus, one of the largest and most active medical school theater groups in the country.
They perform two plays each year. Founded over a century ago by John Mott, the 1946 Nobel Peace Prize recipient, the P&S Club serves to support and provide activities and organizations for the enrichment of the lives of P&S students; the P&S Club is well known for its humanitarian aims. This launch was used to deliver medical services to the Inuit and First Nations fishermen living on the islands of the Labrador coast and was manned by P&S students. In 1767, Dr. Samuel Bard, an alumnus of King's College and the University of Edinburgh Medical School, opened a medical school at Columbia. At the time, the medical program at King's College was the first to open in the Province of New York and only the second to be opened in the American Colonies; the school was modelled on the University of Edinburgh Medical School, which at the time was the world leader. Three years in 1770, King's College conferred its first medical degree to Robert Tucker, this would prove to be the first Doctor of Medicine awarded in the Thirteen Colonies.
Prior to King's College of Medicine offering of the M. D. degree, other American and Canadian medical schools had been offering the M. B. degree. King's College continued to educate young doctors until 1776, when the school was forced to close due to the onset of the Revolutionary War and the occupation of New York by British soldiers. King's College remained closed until 1784 when the school was reopened as Columbia College and in December of that year the faculty of the medical school were re-instated. In 1791, now a prominent colonial physician whom George Washington credited with saving his life, was named dean of the medical school. In 1807, with a growing young nation in need of adequately trained phyicians, the New York State Board of Regents founded, under separate charter, the College of Physicians and Surgeons. Four years in 1811, Dr. Samuel Bard, dean of Columbia University Medical School, became president of the College; the year 1814 saw the merger of Columbia University Medical School into the College of Physicians and Surgeons, a move, made in an attempt to reverse what was perceived as a period of decline for the medical school.
Despite this merger, the College of Physicians and Surgeons retain
JAMA (journal)
JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association is a peer-reviewed medical journal published 48 times a year by the American Medical Association. It publishes original research and editorials covering all aspects of the biomedical sciences; the journal was established in 1883 with Nathan Smith Davis as the founding editor. The journal's current editor-in-chief is Howard Bauchner of Boston University, who succeeded Catherine DeAngelis on July 1, 2011; the journal was established in 1883 by the American Medical Association and was superseded the Transactions of the American Medical Association. Councilor's Bulletin was renamed the Bulletin of the American Medical Association, absorbed by the Journal of the American Medical Association. In 1960, the journal obtained its current title, JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association; the journal is referred to as, JAMA. Continuing Education Opportunities for Physicians was a semiannual journal section providing lists for regional or national levels of continuing medical education.
JAMA has provided this information since 1937. Prior to 1955, the list was produced either quarterly or semiannually. Between 1955 and 1981, the list was available annually, as the number of CME offerings increased from 1,000 to 8,500; the JAMA website states that webinars are available for CME. On 11 July 2016, JAMA published an article by Barack Obama entitled, United States Health Care Reform: Progress to Date and Next Steps, the first academic paper published by a sitting U. S. president. The article was not subject to blind peer-review, it argued for specific policies that future presidents could pursue in order to improve national health care reform implementation. After the controversial 1999 firing of an editor-in-chief, George D. Lundberg, a process was put in place to ensure editorial freedom. A seven-member journal oversight committee was created to evaluate the editor-in-chief and to help ensure editorial independence. Since its inception, the committee has met at least once a year. Presently, JAMA policy states that article content should be attributed to authors, not to the publisher.
From 1964 to 2013, the JAMA journal used images of artwork on its cover and it published essays commenting on the artwork. According to former editor George Lundberg, this practice was designed to link the humanities and medicine. In 2013, a format redesign moved the art feature to an inside page, replacing an image of the artwork on the cover with a table of contents; the purpose of the redesign was to standardize the appearance of all journals in the JAMA Network. The following persons have been editor-in-chief of JAMA: The JAMA journal is abstracted and indexed in: According to the Journal Citation Reports, the JAMA journal has a 2017 impact factor of 47.661, ranking it third out of 154 journals in the category "Medicine, General & Internal". List of American Medical Association journals Official website American Medical Association Archives Free copies of volumes 1-80, from the Internet Archive and HathiTrust
Allentown, Pennsylvania
Allentown is a city located in Lehigh County, United States. It is the 231st largest city in the United States; as of the 2010 census, the city had a total population of 118,032 and is the fastest growing city in all of Pennsylvania. It is the largest city in the metropolitan area known as the Lehigh Valley, which had a population of 821,623 residents as of 2010. Allentown constitutes a portion of the New York City Combined Statistical Area and is the county seat of Lehigh County. In 2012, the city celebrated the 250th anniversary of its founding in 1762. Located on the Lehigh River, Allentown is the largest of three adjacent cities, in Northampton and Lehigh counties, that make up a region of eastern Pennsylvania known as the Lehigh Valley, the other two cities being Bethlehem and Easton, Pennsylvania. Allentown is 50 miles north-northwest of Philadelphia, the sixth most populous city in the United States, 90 miles east-northeast of Harrisburg, the state capital, 90 miles west of New York City, the nation's largest city.
The Norfolk Southern Railway's Lehigh Line, runs through Allentown heading east across the Delaware River. The Norfolk Southern Railway's Reading Line runs through Allentown heading west to Reading, Pennsylvania. Allentown was cited as a "national success story" in April 2016 by the Urban Land Institute for its downtown redevelopment and transformation, one of only six communities in the country to have been named as such. In the early 1700s, the land now occupied by the city of Allentown and Lehigh County was a wilderness of scrub oak where neighboring tribes of Native Americans fished for trout and hunted for deer and other game. In 1736, a large area to the north of Philadelphia, embracing the present site of Allentown and what is now Lehigh County, was deeded by 23 chiefs of the five great Native American nations to John and Richard Penn, sons of William Penn; the price for this tract included shoes and buckles, shirts, scissors, needles, looking glasses and pipes. The land, to become Allentown was part of a 5,000-acre plot William Allen purchased on September 10, 1735 from his business partner Joseph Turner, assigned the warrant to the land by Thomas Penn, son of William Penn, on May 18, 1732.
The land was surveyed on November 23, 1736. A subsequent survey done in 1753 by David Schultz for a road from Easton to Reading, of which present-day Union and Jackson streets were links, shows the location of a log house owned by Allen, situated near the western bank of Jordan Creek, believed to have been built around 1740. Used as a hunting and fishing lodge, here Allen entertained prominent guests including his brother-in-law, James Hamilton, colonial Pennsylvania governor John Penn; the area, today the center of Allentown was laid out as Northampton Town in 1762 by William Allen, a wealthy shipping merchant, former mayor of the city of Philadelphia and then-Chief Justice of the Province of Pennsylvania. It is that a certain amount of rivalry with the Penns prompted Judge Allen to decide to start a town of his own in 1762. Ten years before, in 1752, Northampton and Berks counties had been formed, each with a county seat and Reading, respectively, it is recorded that, in 1763, the year after the founding of Allentown, an effort was made to have the county seat moved from Easton to the new town.
To this effort William Allen lent all his influence as Chief Justice and as the son-in-law of Andrew Hamilton. The influence of the Penns, however and Easton was retained as the county seat of all that vast area which the notorious "Walking Purchase" had opened up; the original plan for the town, now in the archives of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, comprised forty-two city blocks and consisted of 756 lots 60 feet in width and 230 feet in depth. The town was located between present-day Fourth and Tenth Streets, Union and Liberty Streets. Many streets on the original plan were named for Allen's children: Margaret, James and John. Allen Street was named for Allen himself, was the main thoroughfare. Hamilton Street was named for James Hamilton. Gordon Street was named for Sir Patrick Gordon, Deputy Governor of Colonial Pennsylvania from 1726–1736. Chew Street was named for Benjamin Chew, Turner Street was named for Allen's business partner, Joseph Turner. Allen hoped that Northampton Town would displace Easton as the seat of Northampton County and become a commercial center due to its location along the Lehigh River and its proximity to Philadelphia.
Allen gave the property to his son James in 1767. Three years in 1770, James built a summer residence, Trout Hall, in the new town, near the site of his father's former hunting lodge. On March 18, 1811, the town was formally incorporated as the borough of Northampton Town. On March 6, 1812, Lehigh County was formed from the western half of Northampton County, Northampton Town was selected as the county seat; the town was renamed "Allentown" on April 16, 1838, after years of popular usage. Allentown was formally incorporated as a city on March 12, 1867; the beginnings of the American Revolutionary War began in Northampton County on December 21, 1774 when a Committee of Observation for Northampton County was formed by American patriots. At the time, there were 54 homes in Northampton, the number of inhabitants was around 330. With the Decla
New York City
The City of New York called either New York City or New York, is the most populous city in the United States. With an estimated 2017 population of 8,622,698 distributed over a land area of about 302.6 square miles, New York is the most densely populated major city in the United States. Located at the southern tip of the state of New York, the city is the center of the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban landmass and one of the world's most populous megacities, with an estimated 20,320,876 people in its 2017 Metropolitan Statistical Area and 23,876,155 residents in its Combined Statistical Area. A global power city, New York City has been described as the cultural and media capital of the world, exerts a significant impact upon commerce, research, education, tourism, art and sports; the city's fast pace has inspired the term New York minute. Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is an important center for international diplomacy.
Situated on one of the world's largest natural harbors, New York City consists of five boroughs, each of, a separate county of the State of New York. The five boroughs – Brooklyn, Manhattan, The Bronx, Staten Island – were consolidated into a single city in 1898; the city and its metropolitan area constitute the premier gateway for legal immigration to the United States. As many as 800 languages are spoken in New York, making it the most linguistically diverse city in the world. New York City is home to more than 3.2 million residents born outside the United States, the largest foreign-born population of any city in the world. In 2017, the New York metropolitan area produced a gross metropolitan product of US$1.73 trillion. If greater New York City were a sovereign state, it would have the 12th highest GDP in the world. New York is home to the highest number of billionaires of any city in the world. New York City traces its origins to a trading post founded by colonists from the Dutch Republic in 1624 on Lower Manhattan.
The city and its surroundings came under English control in 1664 and were renamed New York after King Charles II of England granted the lands to his brother, the Duke of York. New York served as the capital of the United States from 1785 until 1790, it has been the country's largest city since 1790. The Statue of Liberty greeted millions of immigrants as they came to the U. S. by ship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is an international symbol of the U. S. and its ideals of liberty and peace. In the 21st century, New York has emerged as a global node of creativity and entrepreneurship, social tolerance, environmental sustainability, as a symbol of freedom and cultural diversity. Many districts and landmarks in New York City are well known, with the city having three of the world's ten most visited tourist attractions in 2013 and receiving a record 62.8 million tourists in 2017. Several sources have ranked New York the most photographed city in the world. Times Square, iconic as the world's "heart" and its "Crossroads", is the brightly illuminated hub of the Broadway Theater District, one of the world's busiest pedestrian intersections, a major center of the world's entertainment industry.
The names of many of the city's landmarks and parks are known around the world. Manhattan's real estate market is among the most expensive in the world. New York is home to the largest ethnic Chinese population outside of Asia, with multiple signature Chinatowns developing across the city. Providing continuous 24/7 service, the New York City Subway is the largest single-operator rapid transit system worldwide, with 472 rail stations. Over 120 colleges and universities are located in New York City, including Columbia University, New York University, Rockefeller University, which have been ranked among the top universities in the world. Anchored by Wall Street in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan, New York has been called both the most economically powerful city and the leading financial center of the world, the city is home to the world's two largest stock exchanges by total market capitalization, the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ. In 1664, the city was named in honor of the Duke of York.
James's older brother, King Charles II, had appointed the Duke proprietor of the former territory of New Netherland, including the city of New Amsterdam, which England had seized from the Dutch. During the Wisconsinan glaciation, 75,000 to 11,000 years ago, the New York City region was situated at the edge of a large ice sheet over 1,000 feet in depth; the erosive forward movement of the ice contributed to the separation of what is now Long Island and Staten Island. That action left bedrock at a shallow depth, providing a solid foundation for most of Manhattan's skyscrapers. In the precolonial era, the area of present-day New York City was inhabited by Algonquian Native Americans, including the Lenape, whose homeland, known as Lenapehoking, included Staten Island; the first documented visit into New York Harbor by a European was in 1524 by Giovanni da Verrazzano, a Florentine explorer in the service of the French crown. He named it Nouvelle Angoulême. A Spanish expedition led by captain Estêvão Gomes, a Portuguese sailing for Emperor Charles V, arrived in New York Harbor in January 1525 and charted the mouth of the Hudson River, which he named Río de San Antonio.
The Padrón Rea
Quackery
Quackery synonymous with health fraud, is the promotion of fraudulent or ignorant medical practices. A quack is a "fraudulent or ignorant pretender to medical skill" or "a person who pretends, professionally or publicly, to have skill, qualification or credentials they do not possess; the term quack is a clipped form of the archaic term quacksalver, from Dutch: kwakzalver a "hawker of salve". In the Middle Ages the term quack meant "shouting"; the quacksalvers sold their wares on the market shouting in a loud voice. Common elements of general quackery include questionable diagnoses using questionable diagnostic tests, as well as untested or refuted treatments for serious diseases such as cancer. Quackery is described as "health fraud" with the salient characteristic of aggressive promotion. Since it is difficult to distinguish between those who knowingly promote unproven medical therapies and those who are mistaken as to their effectiveness, United States courts have ruled in defamation cases that accusing someone of quackery or calling a practitioner a quack is not equivalent to accusing that person of committing medical fraud.
To be both quackery and fraud, the quack must know they are misrepresenting the benefits and risks of the medical services offered. In addition to the ethical problems of promising benefits that can not reasonably be expected to occur, quackery includes the risk that patients may choose to forego treatments that are more to help them, in favor of ineffective treatments given by the "quack". Stephen Barrett of Quackwatch defines quackery "as the promotion of unsubstantiated methods that lack a scientifically plausible rationale" and more broadly as: "anything involving overpromotion in the field of health." This definition would include questionable ideas as well as questionable products and services, regardless of the sincerity of their promoters. In line with this definition, the word "fraud" would be reserved only for situations in which deliberate deception is involved. Paul Offit has proposed four ways in which alternative medicine "becomes quackery": "...by recommending against conventional therapies that are helpful."
"...by promoting harmful therapies without adequate warning." "...by draining patients' bank accounts..." "...by promoting magical thinking..." Unproven ineffective, sometimes dangerous medicines and treatments have been peddled throughout human history. Theatrical performances were sometimes given to enhance the credibility of purported medicines. Grandiose claims were made for what could be humble materials indeed: for example, in the mid-19th century revalenta arabica was advertised as having extraordinary restorative virtues as an empirical diet for invalids. Where no fraud was intended, quack remedies contained no effective ingredients whatsoever; some remedies contained substances such as opium and honey, which would have given symptomatic relief but had no curative properties. Some would have addictive qualities to entice the buyer to return; the few effective remedies sold by quacks included emetics and diuretics. Some ingredients did have medicinal effects: mercury and arsenic compounds may have helped some infections and infestations.
However, knowledge of appropriate uses and dosages was limited. The science-based medicine community has criticized the infiltration of alternative medicine into mainstream academic medicine and publications, accusing institutions of "diverting research time and other resources from more fruitful lines of investigation in order to pursue a theory that has no basis in biology." R. W. Donnell coined the phrase "quackademic medicine" to describe this attention given to alternative medicine by academia. Referring to the Flexner Report, he said that medical education "needs a good Flexnerian housecleaning."For example, David Gorski criticized Brian M. Berman, founder of the University of Maryland Center for Integrative Medicine, for writing that "There evidence that both real acupuncture and sham acupuncture more effective than no treatment and that acupuncture can be a useful supplement to other forms of conventional therapy for low back pain." He castigated editors and peer reviewers at the New England Journal of Medicine for allowing it to be published, since it recommended deliberately misleading patients in order to achieve a known placebo effect.
With little understanding of the causes and mechanisms of illnesses marketed "cures" referred to as patent medicines, first came to prominence during the 17th and 18th centuries in Britain and the British colonies, including those in North America. Daffy's Elixir and Turlington's Balsam were among the first products that used branding and mass marketing to create and maintain markets. A similar process occurred in other countries of Europe around the same time, for example with the marketing of Eau de Cologne as a cure-all medicine by Johann Maria Farina and his imitators. Patent medicines contained alcohol or opium, while not curing the diseases for which they were sold as a remedy, did make the imbibers feel better and confusedly appreciative of the product; the number of internationally marketed quack medicines
Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry known as the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, is a program within the transnational American non-profit educational organization Center for Inquiry, which seeks to "promote scientific inquiry, critical investigation, the use of reason in examining controversial and extraordinary claims." Paul Kurtz proposed the establishment of CSICOP in 1976 as an independent non-profit organization, to counter what he regarded as an uncritical acceptance of, support for, paranormal claims by both the media and society in general. Its philosophical position is one of scientific skepticism. CSI's fellows have included notable scientists, Nobel laureates, psychologists and authors, it is headquartered in New York. In the early 1970s, there was an upsurge of interest in the paranormal in the United States; this generated concern in some quarters, where it was seen as part of a growing tide of irrationalism. In 1975, secular humanist philosopher and professor Paul Kurtz had initiated a statement, "Objections to Astrology", co-written with Bart Bok and Lawrence E. Jerome, endorsed by 186 scientists including 19 Nobel laureates and published in the American Humanist Association's newsletter The Humanist, of which Kurtz was editor.
According to Kurtz, the statement was sent to every newspaper in the United States and Canada. The positive reaction to this statement encouraged Kurtz to invite "as many skeptical researchers as could locate" to the 1976 conference with the aim of establishing a new organization dedicated to examining critically a wide range of paranormal claims. Among those invited were Martin Gardner, Ray Hyman, James Randi, Marcello Truzzi, all members of the Resources for the Scientific Evaluation of the Paranormal, a fledgling group with objectives similar to those CSI would subsequently adopt. RSEP disbanded and its members, along with others such as Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, B. F. Skinner, Philip J. Klass, joined Kurtz, Randi and Hyman to formally found the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. Kurtz, Randi and Hyman took seats on the executive board. CSICOP was launched at a specially convened conference of the AHA on April 30 and May 1, 1976. CSICOP would be funded with sales of their magazine, Skeptical Inquirer.
According to the published correspondence between Gardner and Truzzi, disagreements over what CSICOP should be showed how volatile the beginnings of the organization were. Truzzi criticised CSICOP for "acted more like lawyers" taking on a position of dismissal before evaluating the claims, saying that CSICOP took a "debunking stance". Gardner on the other hand "opposed'believers' in the paranormal becoming CSICOP members" which Truzzi supported. Gardner felt that Truzzi "conferred too much respectability to nonsense"; the formal mission statement, approved in 2006 and still current, states:The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry promotes science and scientific inquiry, critical thinking, science education, the use of reason in examining important issues. It encourages the critical investigation of controversial or extraordinary claims from a responsible, scientific point of view and disseminates factual information about the results of such inquiries to the scientific community, the media, the public.
A shorter version of the mission statement appears in every issue: "... promotes scientific inquiry, critical investigation, the use of reason in examining controversial and extraordinary claims." A previous mission statement referred to "investigation of paranormal and fringe-science claims", but the 2006 change recognized and ratified a wider purview for CSI and its magazine, Skeptical Inquirer, that includes "new sciencerelated issues at the intersection of science and public concerns, while not ignoring core topics". A history of the first two decades is available in The Encyclopedia of the Paranormal published in 1998 by S. I. editor Kendrick Frazier. In 2018, Frazier reemphasized the importance of the Committee's work by saying that "e need independent, evidence-based, science-based critical investigation and inquiry ow more than at any other time in our history." Paul Kurtz was inspired by the 1949 Belgian organization Comité Para, whose full name was Comité Belge pour l'Investigation Scientifique des Phénomènes Réputés Paranormaux.
In 1976, the proposed name was "Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal and Other Phenomena", shortened to "Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal." The initial acronym, "CSICP" was difficult to pronounce and so was changed to "CSICOP." According to James Alcock, it was never intended to be "Psi Cop", a nickname that some of the group's detractors adopted. In November 2006, CSICOP further shortened its name to "Committee for Skeptical Inquiry", pronounced C-S-I; the reasons for the change were to create a name, shorter, more "media-friendly", to remove "paranormal" from the name, to reflect more the actual scope of the organization with its broader focus on critical thinking and rationality in general, because "it includes the root words of our magazine's title, the Skeptical Inquirer". In order to carry out its mission, the Committee "maintains a network of people interested in critically examining paranormal, fringe science, other claims, in contributing to consumer education.
