Recent outbreaks of measles have centered in specific communities, pointing to the influence of social ties on vaccination practices. This study adds to the conversation on public understanding of vaccine-related science, documenting how the individualist epistemologies highlighted in prior research are externalized and validated in communication with others, focusing on how the narrative strategies used to do so contribute to community building among vaccine refusing and hesitant parents. Through qualitative content analysis of testimonials given to the creators of the anti-vaccination documentary VaxXed, we identify how the common narrative strategies used to question the scientific consensus on vaccines—distrust of doctors, self-diagnosis, building credibility, advocacy, and community building—build a competing consensus based on personal expertise. With this approach, we are better able to understand how participation in online communities strengthens the privileging of individualist epistemologies among vaccine refusing and hesitant parents.

This article addresses the problem of expertise in a democratic political system: the tension between the authority of expertise and the democratic values that guide political life. We argue that for certain problems, expertise needs to be understood as a dialogical process, and we conceptualize an understanding of expertise through and as argument that positions expertise as constituted by and a function of democratic values and practices, rather than in the possession of, acquisition of, or relationship to epistemic materials. Conceptualizing expertise through argument leads us to see expertise as a kind of phronetic practice, oriented toward judgments and problems, characterized by its ability to provide inventional capacities for selecting the best possible resolution of a particular problem vis-à-vis particular expectations regarding the resolution of a problem. At its core, expertise thus comes to exist in reference not to epistemic but to dialogical, deliberative, democratic practice.

Recently, concerns have been raised over the potential impacts of commercial relationships on editorial practices in biomedical publishing. Specifically, it has been suggested that certain commercial relationships may make editors more open to publishing articles with author conflicts of interest (aCOI). Using a data set of 128,781 articles published in 159 journals, we evaluated the relationships among commercial publishing practices and reported author conflicts of interest. The 159 journals were grouped according to commercial biases (reprint services, advertising revenue, and ownership by a large commercial publishing firm). 30.6% (39,440) of articles were published in journals showing no evidence of evaluated commercial publishing relationships. 33.9% (43,630) were published in journals accepting advertising and reprint fees; 31.7% (40,887) in journals owned by large publishing firms; 1.2% (1,589) in journals accepting reprint fees only; and 2.5% (3,235) in journals accepting only advertising fees. Journals with commercial relationships were more likely to publish articles with aCOI (9.2% (92/1000) vs. 6.4% (64/1000), p = 0.024). In the multivariate analysis, only a journal's acceptance of reprint fees served as a significant predictor (OR = 2.81 at 95% CI, 1.5 to 8.6). Shared control estimation was used to evaluate the relationships between commercial publishing practices and aCOI frequency in total and by type. BCa-corrected mean difference effect sizes ranged from-1.0 to 6.1, and confirm findings indicating that accepting reprint fees may constitute the most significant commercial bias. The findings indicate that concerns over the influence of industry advertising in medical journals may be overstated, and that accepting fees for reprints may constitute the largest risk of bias for editorial decision-making.

The goal of this paper is to consider rhetorical effects as the propagation of rhetorical expressions across large sets of texts, measured by the extent to which rhetorical expressions, structures, or practices become replicated in texts and sites of rhetorical in(ter)vention. The paper draws on lines of scholarship in the digital humanities and computational rhetoric-primarily, sequential structuring of semantic contexts, semantic parsing of unstructured text, and diachronic tracking of textual expressions-to extend their conceptual and methodological insights into a computational framework for assessing rhetorical effectiveness. It offers a test case for this concept through an analysis of how Congress has framed human agency toward addressing climate change.