Posted by Gary Schwitzer in Health care journalism, Journal practices
Interesting case study raised by the Retraction Watch blog.
A 2009 journal article – promoted in a news release by the journal – and picked up by many news organizations – has now been retracted by the authors.
But now the journal issued no news release about the retraction – an issue of transparency that the RW blog raises.
And you can guess how much news coverage the retraction will get.
And this was all over a molecule that could supposedly “make breast tumors respond to a drug to which they’re not normally susceptible” – as the RW blog put it. But it was also a molecule, RW points out, that wasn’t even in clinical trials yet.
He/she who lives by the journal news release risks one’s longterm credibility.
Yes, of course a retraction should get equal attention as the initial statement of fact.
Seems there’s been a wee rash of journal retractions lately – like the case of Dr. Andrew Wakefield, the now-discredited darling of the autism/childhood vaccination-link conspiracy movement whose 1998 study published in The Lancet was finally pulled (12 years later!) after its evidence was described by the journal’s editors as a “a damning indictment of the man and his research.”
And last month, we learned of the Nobel prize-winning scientist Dr. Linda Buck who has been forced to retract not one, not two, but THREE of her published peer-reviewed journal articles.
This really pokes a damning finger at the entire peer review system, not to mention the reputation of those whose current and future work gets published.
I for one am doing my small bit to help increase coverage of retractions! See more on THE ETHICAL NAG: MARKETING ETHICS FOR THE EASILY SWAYED: “Nobel Prize Winner Forced to Retract Three Flawed Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles”
Top retractions of 2010 by TheScientist. A list of the biggest papers and scientists involved in retractions in the last year.
http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/57864/
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Overall, this was an easy-to-follow summary. But there was a clear difference between this and a competing Boston Globe story, which did a better job offering context and analysis.
This Boston Globe blog post gave its audience a more thorough understanding of an emerging approach to virtual colonoscopy than the Wall Street Journal.
Longer, but overall not any better, than the coverage from the competing LA Times story. Not thorough enough to explain what this preliminary research actually means for readers–which is not much at this point.
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Gunther Eysenbach posted on December 3, 2010 at 11:19 am
I’ve written about another case – where there was also an empirical evaluation of how much attention the retraction got – and “retraction ethics” here:
Eysenbach G, Kummervold PE
“Is Cybermedicine Killing You?” – The Story of a Cochrane Disaster
J Med Internet Res 2005;7(2):e21
doi: 10.2196/jmir.7.2.e21