A new low - having your letter to the editor retracted

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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From time to time researchers have their scientific journal publications go down the memory hole, typically due to accidental/careless errors, plagiarism or outright deception. This is the first time I’ve heard of someone’s letter to the editor of a journal (Toxicology) having to be retracted.

*"Last June, Hawkes and Benhamu published a letter entitled “Questions about methodological and ethical quality of a vaccine adjuvant critical paper,” about the 2016 paper by Shaw and his colleagues; in September, Shaw, Christopher Exley of Keele University in the UK, Guillemette Crépeaux and Romain K. Gherardi, both of the Université Paris Est Créteil in France, fired back with a letter of their own, in which they accused Hawkes and Benhamu of fabricating their affiliations:

… Hawkes suggests, incorrectly, that he is currently a staff member at the University of Melbourne and neither of the affiliations given by Benhamu have even heard of her!

After reading the letter, Hawkes provided the journal with proof that he works at the University of Melbourne in Victoria, Australia, and that Benhamu “has written permission from Monash Bioethics Centre (as a post-graduate student and teaching associate) to list them as affiliations” and is a full time employee of Austin Health, both in Victoria.

A commenter on PubPeer (who Hawkes said was not him or Benhamu) also pointed out potential issues with the authors’ 2016 paper and letter, noting:

I have never seen a Letter to the Editor as unprofessional as this.

On January 19, Mihail Grecea, an expert in publishing ethics at Elsevier, told Hawkes that the journal would be retracting the letter within three weeks. The letter was retracted a month later."*

I love these dust-ups among scientists. It’s sort of like Sheldon and Leonard wrestling on the floor, only in real life.

The publisher (Elsevier)'s excuses for not fact-checking before publishing the questioned letter are noteworthy.

A co-author of the letter (Shaw) has what’s been called a “troubled publication history”, having had three published papers retracted in the last two years (!). Now he’s got something new for his collection.

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Weren’t we supposed to be a paper-less society by now? :smiley:

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Talk about back biting and cattiness! They remind me of adolescent girls.

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Thanks for this. My wife is in the middle of a book on the vaccine controversy, and she’ll like this.
There have been anti-vax papers retracted from non-refereed online journals, which is pretty bad, but this is worse.

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2017 wasn’t a great year for antivax papers - Retraction Watch put one such article on its list of Top Ten Retractions for 2017, after it was retracted twice but still wound up mysteriously reappearing online.

The article appeared in the journal Frontiers in Public Health, which also gained notoriety last year for retracting an article on chemtrails. Another Frontiers journal retracted an article on whether you could tell living people from dead ones by looking at their photographs.

Quality publications.

I love Retraction Watch. I should make a donation.

6

It’s one thing to make false statements about your critics’ credentials. Some scientists counter criticism by filing lawsuits.

A Stanford professor had filed a $10 million defamation lawsuit against a scientific journal (PNAS) and the author of an article criticizing his paper on renewable energy. He now says he’s dropping the suit (shortly after the co-defendants asked a court to dismiss it under a D.C. law prohibiting SLAPP suits).

The other trend I find disturbing is demanding someone’s e-mail and other communications through Freedom of Information Act filings, in an effort to malign them as shills through tenuous or nonexistent connections to industry or disapproved-of advocacy groups.

If you can’t counter well-reasoned evidence-based scientific arguments with ones of your own, you should find another hobby.

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Just wasn’t toxic enough.