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Comment by Angostura | Hacker News Reader

> They have a poor record frankly with this kind of thing, Andrew Wakefield et al chief among them.

Would you care to name some others?

Of the top 10 most highly cited papers that have been retracted, 3 of them are in the Lancet, more than any other journal [1].

[1] https://retractionwatch.com/the-retraction-watch-leaderboard...

That number can't be interpreted without context — how many of the top 100 most highly cited papers are in the Lancet? If it's ~30 then your data point doesn't mean anything.

Papers in Lancet are generally more highly cited than average, since it's the most prominent and respected medical journal. Is it any surprise that even the retracted papers in Lancet are highly cited? Surely that's a function of their visibility.

I'm not sure what kind of conclusion we can take from that dataset. It is only 10 papers and it doesn't take into account the average number of citations for the non-retracted articles in each journal.

I was asked to provide examples of the Lancet's poor track record, which I have done. I am not trying to prove it is better or worse than any other journal.

How do you know that it is a poor track record if you do not know how it is ranked against others?

Even if the Lancet had published all top 10 highly cited papers, wouldn’t 3 of them being retracted be concerning to you?

It's a list of "Top 10 most highly cited retracted papers", not "Top 10 most highly cited papers". Without more information about highly cited papers in general (e.g. what proportion are in the Lancet?), we can't tell exactly how concerning 3 being from the Lancet should be.

A top tier journal has 3 papers with >500 citations that turned out to be bullshit in the last 10 years. One of them is probably the premiere example of academic misconduct in the last 50 years, catalysing the anti-vax movement and causing untold harm. What's your definition of poor?

> I am not trying to prove it is better or worse than any other journal.

In that case it's not really clear why you decide to stop reading the Lancet, rather than any other journal? Or have you stopped reading all journals

EAT-Lancet: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Autism and vaccine study https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2010/02/lancet_wak...

That /is/ the Wakefield study.

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