Tag: No action taken
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Leaderboard
How long does it take to retract a publication? We’ve now notified journals about publication integrity concerns in more than 500 publications. 130 have been retracted following a notification. A common complaint about the publication integrity process is how slow it is. We’ve created leaderboards for the fastest retractions and the slowest ones. This is…
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Nitrates and osteoporosis- a complex saga of fabrication and plagiarism.
We start in the middle of the saga… In 2011, Sophie Jamal published a paper in JAMA that showed really promising results for nitrate treatment for osteoporosis. Bone density went up substantially over two years. As nitrates had been used for years in heart disease, it looked like they might prove to be a cheap,…
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The question you gotta ask yourself is “Do I feel lucky?” Well, do ya, punk?
Should a reviewer be the judge, jury, and executioner for a paper? F1000 seems to think so. In August 2021, I (MB) was asked to review this paper for F1000. I hadn’t reviewed for F1000 before and didn’t know anything about their publication model, and agreed because the abstract results seemed astonishing and so my…
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How many ducks do you need to line up to get a publication retracted?
Thanks to Ivan Oransky at Retraction Watch for publishing this post. You can read the edited and shortened version at the Retraction Watch website here. There are a few comments, mostly off-topic, but the first comment suggests we should publish our experience rather than “just” blogging it. The commenter obviously doesn’t realise that we’ve published…
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Registering incredulity
Setting the Scene Clinical trial registration was introduced in 2005, championed by the International Committee of Medical Editors (ICMJE), as a means of reducing publication bias and improving transparency in clinical research. Member journals would require trial registration prior to participant enrollment as a prerequisite for consideration of publication of the trial report. There are…
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All I want is the truth, just give me some truth
When someone fabricates data for several publications over a number of years, is eventually caught out and the papers retracted, how reliable are their other publications? That is the question we asked about publications by Dr Sophie Jamal. She (eventually) admitted data fabrication in one publication in JAMA on nitrate treatment for osteoporosis which led…
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You say it best when you say nothing at all
In 2007, Lappe and colleagues published the results for a secondary endpoint from their 4 year trial of calcium or calcium and vitamin D supplements in 1179 post-menopausal women. The results suggested that: Improving calcium and vitamin D nutritional status substantially reduces all-cancer risk in postmenopausal women. More on that conclusion later. There have only…
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You can drag a horse to water, but it will not necessarily drink.
The Problems In 2013, we were interested in why different meta-analyses of vitamin D came to different conclusions. We looked at the issue for falls and fractures. We were puzzled why different meta-analysis had different data for a trial by Pfeifer and colleagues published in Osteoporosis International in 2009. The cause of confusion was clear…