Scientific retractions
Gwern Branwen
http://www.esajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1890/ES10-00142.1
> We find that original articles were cited 17 times more than rebuttals, and that annual citation numbers were unaffected by rebuttals. When citations did not mention rebuttals, 95% accepted the thesis of the original article uncritically, and support remained high over time. On the rare occasions when rebuttals were cited, the citing papers on average had neutral views of the original article, and 8% actually believed that the rebuttal agreed with the original article. Overall, only 5% of all citations were critical of the original paper. Our results point to an urgent need to change current publishing models to ensure that rebuttals are prominently linked to original articles...For those convinced that science is self-correcting, and progresses in a forward direction over time, we offer only discouragement. We had anticipated that as time passed, citations of the original articles would become more negative, and these articles would be less cited than other articles published in the same journal and year. In fact, support for the original articles remained undiminished over time and perhaps even increased, and we found no evidence of a decline in citations for any of the original articles following publication of the rebuttals.
http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/298/21/2517.short
> For the 2 vitamin E epidemiological studies, even in 2005, 50% of citing articles remained favorable. A favorable stance was independently less likely in more recent articles, specifically in articles that also cited the HOPE trial (odds ratio for 2001, 0.05 [95% confidence interval, 0.01-0.19; P < .001] and the odds ratio for 2005, 0.06 [95% confidence interval, 0.02-0.24; P < .001], as compared with 1997), and in general/internal medicine vs specialty journals. Among articles citing the HOPE trial in 2005, 41.4% were unfavorable. In 2006, 62.5% of articles referencing the highly cited article that had proposed beta-carotene and 61.7% of those referencing the highly cited article on estrogen effectiveness were still favorable; 100% and 96%, respectively, of the citations appeared in specialty journals; and citations were significantly less favorable (P = .001 and P = .009, respectively) when the major contradicting trials were also mentioned. Counterarguments defending vitamin E or estrogen included diverse selection and information biases and genuine differences across studies in participants, interventions, cointerventions, and outcomes. Favorable citations to beta-carotene, long after evidence contradicted its effectiveness, did not consider the contradicting evidence.
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gwern
http://www.gwern.net
γενβιρΟ
sorry. I won't delete this message. I'm being a bit weird at the
moment.
For fear of saying something I dislike, which will probably only
result in me trying to remove the comment, I'll keep it short:
Tahknyuo for mientonnig tihs!
On Nov 26, 7:20 pm, Gwern Branwen <gwe...@gmail.com> wrote:
> http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/08/why-are-scientific-retracti...