How to prove anything with a review article

Thus the subtitle of this blog posting at PLoS, referencing this article on “Cigarette smoking: an underused tool in high-performance endurance training”. The point being that you can write a review article to argue anything you want, with sufficient cherry-picking and chains of links.

If you are doing actual experiments and making observations or proving theorems, then to a large extent—larger in some sciences than in others—you are constrained by the brute facts. But when writing secondary literature, especially in areas where data is generally fuzzier, it is easy, whether deliberately or not, to write to a bottom line, including findings you like and excluding those you don’t.

Something to bear in mind when reading or writing any review article.