Many scientists citing two scandalous Covid-19 papers ignore their retractions
sciencemag.org
sciencemag.org
Particularly during the pandemic, the peer review / publishing process has become so slow in some cases that it's easily understandable to have not removed a citation, or to have had a year go by before publication.
1) I can't think of too many times that I've gone back to the source to read a paper. I download the PDF and never go back the website. How would I know about the retraction? 2) Changes to the text can require another round of review (possibly adds two months?). 3) Authors are generally against issuing corrections post-publication since the box that's added to the top of the paper looks similar to a retraction [0]. 4) Authors are busy or lazy.
>> Given that no editor or reviewer caught the problem, she said, “I plan to discuss with the staff incorporating such screening into manuscript processing.”
Shouldn't it be the responsibility of the publisher to add a notification to papers that cited a retracted paper? ("Be wary of things relating to ref #32.") We pay Nature Communications (cited in the article) ~$5000 to publish [1]... this should already be done for you.
[0] e.g., this PNAS paper: https://www.pnas.org/content/116/32/15877. Why not make the retraction notification a bright red box?
[1] https://www.nature.com/ncomms/about/article-processing-charg...
Discussed on HN here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23146091
https://retractionwatch.com/retracted-coronavirus-covid-19-p...
“Worst paper of 2020?” https://scienceintegritydigest.com/2020/07/23/worst-paper-of...
If a historian cited a work that turned out to be a forgery, and did not acknowledge in their paper that it was a forgery, then their paper would certainly be suspect. True citing a retracted paper is not automatically 100% unacceptable, but it is something that should automatically demand further scrutiny.
Yes... same as a scientist uses citations.
Citing someone doesn't mean 'I fully believe and support this person', it means 'I'm referring to what this person said' and they believe that's what the paper said. That's all. The text using the citation adds the context of what the author thinks.
So... the same way that a scientist could cite a retracted paper. To say that these people said this thing and then it was retracted. To discuss the context of that retraction and what it means, and so on.
I didn't say it was.
> Or have I messed some recent developments?
Why are you being sarcastic?
It's my nature.
Of course you could implement those systems, but they’d be costly either in terms of further centralizing the peer review process behind companies like Elsevier or taking critical human time away from reviewing the actual results. And the benefits if you implemented these review systems might be highly limited, plus you’d probably run into a host of additional problems.
On the “highly limited” side, many papers have a related work section that doesn’t list primary results that are relevant to the paper’s findings, but instead mainly serves as a reference guide. You might be writing a paper on (here I’m making up silly analogies) LED light bulbs, and you’d have a set of references that begins with “a line of work looks at incandescent light bulbs”. An accidental citation to a retracted work there is sloppy, but mostly scientifically irrelevant when no result in the paper actually refers to anything in those citations (which is why these citations slip by manual reviewers, who focus their valuable review time on citations that affect the scientific results in the paper.)
You also have the more annoying problem that citation formats aren’t standardized, so it’s easy for a retracted paper to be cited in a format that an automated review system will miss. Google Scholar throws all the might of Google’s systems at this, and still treats the preprint version and conference version of my papers as different works. (This might be the right treatment or it might be the wrong one, but it’s murder on retraction scanners if the author cites the preprint.) Plus then there’s the additional burden of dealing with unimportant retractions that are issued after a paper that cites them has been published, which should be addressed but largely just cause annoying work for scientists and publishers and (as the article notes) are aggravating because it’s difficult for readers to distinguish a minor correction regarding an unimportant reference from a major one that affects the findings of the work.
Bill Gates, are you litening? This is a chance to revolutionize science!!!
IMO blocchain technology could be actually a solution for such a problem, where one publications cryptographic hash consists of the content of the publication and the cryptographic hashes of it's citations. If a citation get's invalidated for whatever reason, papers citing it would automatically get invalidated too, and so on. Until someone fixes or removes the faulty citation and revalidates their part of the chain, and so forth.
Just imagine authors having puplic wallets proving their authorship.
If someone wants to pick up this idea, I'd be happy with 10% of the earnings that can be made with it.
Amongst scientists everybody ignored those political papers, just as the many political models with doomsday predictions (also Lancet). They understand the need for politicians to be inaccurate and unscientific. Within the covid-19 community most flaws in preprint papers were immediately pointed out, but you could not blog about without loosing your job (Trump), but nevertheless news magazines still published the worst nonsense.
The intent of the retraction seems to be to suggest that the epidemic is overblown, to which I would respond by pointing to the the two million dead people, and the excellent correlation of positive test results with new dead people.
I'll leave the translation up to the readers.
That former Pfizer guy apparently claimed in October that the coronavirus pandemic is “effectively over” in the United Kingdom. Clearly a man with special insights.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/dec/02/blog-posti...
(For the lazier, the technical discussion starts at the 12th tweet.)
Drosten, Corman et al. from the Charité (among Europe's largest and most reputable university hospitals and medical schools) published a paper [1] in January 2020 [2] in the "Eurosurveillance Journal" in which they described a diagnostic workflow to detect SARS-CoV-2 (not "SARS-CoV-19", as you say) which they had developed and tested (both sensitivity and specificity). That became known as the Drosten PCR, and was the standard procedure initially to detect the virus (at least in Germany).
A group of 22 nutcases with bad English claim that the Drosten/Corman paper is severely flawed, put up a "report" "refuting" it (on a website, not published) and demand that Eurosurveillance retract it.
That report (which highlights a few very minor actual issues, but is otherwise false, misleading, and blown up entirely out of proportion) is later used by covidiots to claim that PCR testing is flawed and full of false positives, the virus doesn't exist, and further nonsense.
Needless to say, there are by now several different PCR testing protocols, they have been developed further, crosschecked, etc, and there is no major problem with PCR testing. Certainly no "big scandal".
This is political posturing and fabrication applied to medicine. Sad.
[1] https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.E...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31992387/
[2] It was submitted January 21st 2020 and accepted for publication on January 22nd 2020. On January 23rd 2020 the paper was online.
However, I am saying that these guys are nutcases with bad English, and Drosten is an eminent expert on coronaviruses, and also the Drosten PCR has proven to be fine, and also the "report" the nutcases wrote has been largely refuted, by people that know much more about this than I do.
This article outlining the "Ad hominem fallacy fallacy" might be instructive.
https://laurencetennant.com/bonds/adhominem.html
> Put briefly, ad hominem is "You are an ignorant person, therefore your arguments are wrong", and not "Your arguments are wrong, therefore you are an ignorant person." The latter statement may be fallacious, but it's not an ad hominem fallacy.
It’s so odd that top level comment would be flagged.
The initial comment was rightfully flagged because it either ignores the bad and unscientific nature of the attacks on the paper.
It's a classic example of desperately trying to shoot the messengers and tboyd47 is correct to say it doesn't belong here. His post was flagged simply because he's another messenger and thus is getting shot - it obviously has nothing to do with the politeness or quality of his posts.
The reply actually addresses all the points.
* It provides an objective description of the test, supported by primary sources.
* Provides a description of the sources of criticism that were referred to in the initial statement.
* Describes the nature and quality of the criticism.
* Allows you to check that the papers under attack were not retracted, which is the testament to the scientific substance of said attacks.
* More importantly, raises the attention to the fact that there are far more test procedures nowadays which, even if we took the complains at face value, render them null.
There's a radical fringe which for some unexplained reason are both radically anti-science and heavily invested in trying to produce and use fraudulent pseudo-scientific work to attack scientific findings they find politically inconvenient, as a kind of Trojan horse based on appeals to authority.
Firstly, lack of retraction does not imply quality. I've read papers about COVID that were not merely wrong but deliberatively deceptive, and they haven't been retracted. Public health research just has a huge problem with bad papers, and it's not one they're admitting to.
Secondly, have you actually read the criticisms? A big part of it is that the Drosten protocol appears to have been published via a journal that he himself controls, hence the 24 hour submission-to-publication turnaround time. Obviously if that is true the paper will never be retracted, thus using lack of retraction as a way to attack the critics is circular; the non-independence of the publication path is itself a part of their criticism.
Thirdly, I read the criticism. A few things were indeed quibbly and didn't seem that important, others were not good but perhaps understandable if you make allowances for extreme speed. Other criticisms were highly substantive. But this may depend on your pre-existing value system. A critical problem with PCR testing is the way the people behind it appear to consider false positives either non-existent or entirely free: it's clear that everything about these testing programmes is designed to maximize positive results at all costs. They're terrified of false negatives but don't care about FPs at all. That isn't excusable.
Finally, w.r.t. "more test procedures", they all seem to have very similar reliability problems that are dismissed with circular logic of the form, "COVID is anyone who tests positive, therefore there are no false positives" or "A PCR positive means it detected RNA, and PCR is the most sensitive way to detect RNA, therefore if RNA is present you get a PCR positive, therefore the test works fine", all of which is entirely blind to the way it's being used in the real world.
There's a radical fringe which for some unexplained reason are both radically anti-science and heavily invested in trying to produce and use fraudulent pseudo-scientific work to attack scientific findings they find politically inconvenient, as a kind of Trojan horse based on appeals to authority
Yes, that fringe is called the public health establishment.
You should have contributed something to the conversation other than saying steelman.
I picked a randomish name (English based since there will be more English articles) from the signatures and found this
Dr. Kevin P. Corbett
https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/who-were-the-so-calle...