A “take with a grain of salt” label for Holiday Review articles

For the past decade CMAJ has published a series of articles inspired by the holiday season in a section called the Holiday Review. Some of these articles consist of quirky questions addressed with real data whereas others are, in the words of CMAJ's editors, “evidence-free exaggeration and premeditated preposterousness.” Although these articles are a welcome holiday diversion for many physicians, confusion has sometimes arisen because these articles are indexed in MEDLINE as if they were real research articles.

To see if these articles have been mistaken for evidence-based articles, I searched Google Scholar for citations of Holiday Review articles published in 1999–2006 and then reviewed these citations. In some instances, the authors citing Holiday Review articles clearly understood that they were citing a tongue-in-cheek “study.” However, in at least 4 instances, the citing authors appear to have mistakenly cited evidence-free articles as if they were real studies: a citation1 of a case report in which the patient was a cartoon character,2 a citation3 of my own completely evidence-free paper4 and 2 other citations5^,6 of Holiday Review spoof studies.7^,8 If CMAJ's Holiday Review articles are to continue being indexed in MEDLINE, perhaps it would be prudent to insert a note at the end of each evidence-free abstract stating that the article is for entertainment purposes only and is not a real study.