Out! Out! Out!

15 Responses to Out! Out! Out!

1. Richard P. Grant says:

   February 2, 2010 at 5:57 pm

   Heh. (and I read ‘vaccine’ as ‘vacuous’, initially…)
2. Cath Ennis says:

   February 2, 2010 at 6:19 pm

   HA!
   Maybe you need a vacation.
3. Richard Wintle says:

   February 2, 2010 at 6:43 pm

   HOORAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!
   If only there were some was to email this to everybody. And I mean everybody.
4. Cath Ennis says:

   February 2, 2010 at 6:52 pm

   “Autism-vaccine” is trending on Twitter (in Canada, anyway – I signed up for local trends and now I can’t see the global ones). The CBC and BBC are playing it up too. I haven’t looked elsewhere, but the level of coverage seems good!
5. Richard P. Grant says:

   February 2, 2010 at 6:59 pm

   Vacillation, maybe.
6. Cath Ennis says:

   February 2, 2010 at 7:37 pm

   Careful, vacillation can cause autism smallpox seasickness.
7. Åsa Karlström says:

   February 2, 2010 at 7:54 pm

   Lovely. The best story of the day 🙂
8. Henry Gee says:

   February 2, 2010 at 9:49 pm

   Ermmm…. How can a journal retract a paper? I always thought that this was a job for the authors. And it strikes me that it would be better that some papers weren’t published at all, or at least subject to more rigorous review, than published and then withdrawn later. Now, I know the one about people without sin releasing calcium from intracellular stores, and halibut being good enough for Jehovah, and people in glass houses waiting for the next bus to the station, and so on. But still.
9. Cath Ennis says:

   February 2, 2010 at 9:58 pm

   Dunno. What’s Nature‘s policy in cases where some authors want to retract a paper, but there are one or more hold-outs? And one of the hold-outs just got found guilty of research misconduct? Surely the former situation has arisen, if not the latter.
   ” it strikes me that it would be better that some papers weren’t published at all, or at least subject to more rigorous review”
   that would indeed have been much, much, much better in this case!
   Åsa, I enjoyed it too!
10. Eva Amsen says:

    February 2, 2010 at 10:31 pm

    “people in glass houses waiting for the next bus to the station”
    I know what you were going for, but you just described a bus shelter =)
11. Alyssa Gilbert says:

    February 2, 2010 at 11:30 pm

    Funny enough, I found out about this via someone posting the story to Facebook!
12. Cath Ennis says:

    February 2, 2010 at 11:37 pm

    Eva, that was a deceptively on-topic comment given your recent post about hearing about people using the internet to get accurate information about vaccines… at a bus stop! (did it have a shelter?)
    Alyssa, cool! Was it a scientist?
13. Austin Elliott says:

    February 3, 2010 at 2:32 am

    bq. “Funnily enough, I found out about this via someone posting the story to Facebook!”
    It was also widely publicised on Twitter, e.g. by Ben Goldacre and others in the Bad Science fraternity.
14. Maxine Clarke says:

    February 4, 2010 at 11:42 am

    A bit late answering the question, but yes, a journal can retract a paper above the head of the authors, if the journal has made its enquiry into a matter and come to its own conclusion. Nature and the Nature journals will do this if necessary. If all authors don’t agree on a retraction, what we do is to, in effect, peer-review the retraction or contact relevant parties directly (might be a funder or an ethics committee, for example). If a journal has published a paper and subsequent information comes to light that renders that paper wrong or doubtful, the journal’s duty is to inform readers – ulitmately, irrespective of the authors, although obviously it is much better and clearer for readers if the authors do agree on what went wrong and state that reason.
    Journals also retract and remove papers for legal reasons.
15. Cath Ennis says:

    February 8, 2010 at 5:44 pm

    Thanks for that information, Maxine! It must be very stressful for everyone when that situation arises.

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