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V_V comments on Too good to be true - Less Wrong
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Comments (119)
There's something that just didn't get conveyed: English language. That paper, with it's idiot finding, was looking at the studies downloaded from Medline and presumably published in English, or at least with an English abstract (the search was done for English terms and no translation efforts were mentioned).
As long as researchers retain freedom to either write their study up in English or not there's going to be an additional publication-in-a-very-foreign-language bias.
With regards to acupuncture, one thing that didn't happen, is soviet union being full of acupuncture centres and posters about awesomeness of acupuncture everywhere on the walls, something that would have happened if there was indeed such a high prevalence of positive findings in locally available literature.
As a rule of thumb, I would say that any research published after the early 1990s in a language other than English is most likely crap.
Why do you think it changed, and in the early 1990s specifically? (The original study I posted only examined '90s papers and so couldn't show any time-series like that, so it can't be why you think that.)
I suppose that before the 1990s respectable Soviet scientists published primarily in Russian.