Celebrities have been at it again. Warning of dangers from the HPV vaccine, confusing tides, promoting colon cleansing and intravenous vitamins, and advising on allergies. Some examples in our annual review of celebrity science are funny. Some are dangerous.

Every year we publish tips alongside the review to offer pointers: correlation is not the same as cause, a conclusion based on your own experience is not reliable, if it sounds too good to be true it usually is. But we couldn't have predicted a fashion for injecting vitamins, or arching the foot to become orgasmic and the whole cause-and-effect-confusion that involved.

The review provokes frustrated comments, that people who listen to these celebrity pronouncements deserve all the bad cancer advice or ridiculous diets they get. Certainly when we started the review six years ago some scientists were a bit sniffy about making themselves available to respond to celebrity questions. Many people regret that we live in this age of celebrity, when you're more likely to see an inquiry into illegal journalistic practices at the News of the World if a celebrity fronts the issue. But we do live in that world, and thankfully we're seeing increasing willingness among scientists to help celebrities.

Celebrity claims have a particular kind of reach. They boast a large share of high-impact broadcast and social media followed by the longevity of weekly and monthly magazines which then float around indefinitely in doctors' waiting rooms. Once uttered, their views go viral and global, and it is hard to mount an effective response, especially on subjects like vaccine safety.

So circumspection by these social influencers, before they set forth their views, goes a long way. That is why we encourage them, their agents and advisers, to call so we can put them in touch with relevant scientists. It is also why we introduced the "stick" of the annual review naming those who have shared their scientifically implausible claims with the world.

At the very least we want to use a bit of the interest in celebrity to carry some discussion about science and evidence out into the chattersphere. There has been more discussion about whale sperm this past 24 hours than one might expect in the average day, since we drew attention to Nicole Polizzi's view that this accounts for the sea being salty, but there has also been more discussion about the accumulation of minerals in the sea (including gold) through years of water running over rocks.

That's what we're looking for. The celebrity and science review follows celebrity chat into places where science is rarely covered. In previous years parts of the review have appeared in late-night music shows, cookery programmes, diet magazines, comedy quizzes, online gossip and GP advice columns. My favourite was the New Musical Express, which a few years ago carried a discussion about whether Mariah Carey's album title E=MC2 meant what she thought it meant.

Our review is a conversation about the need to take responsibility for spreading misinformation. It is drawn from material members of the public and scientists contact us about and our own monitoring. We can't get a complete picture but there do seem to be signs of progress. Our call logs show that we're hearing more often from people looking into claims before making them and from reporters wanting a scientific view before repeating them. Medical charities are becoming admirably proactive in briefing their celebrity champions and we are working with many organisations to increase responses to silly claims in real time, something that the blogosphere enhances. In the review we now commend people who get it right and this year we had more contenders for that than in any previous year.

The review is a stick. The carrot for celebrities is being more responsible and credible. Can we get celebrities to check their science like they check their colons and their Twitter counters? That's the challenge.