
Ten takeaways from ten years at Retraction Watch - severine
https://retractionwatch.com/2020/08/03/ten-takeaways-from-ten-years-at-retraction-watch/
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elahieh
I do have two anecdotes on this - came across two papers in my exact area of
combinatorics that had incorrect results; but they had been submitted to IEEE
conferences. So presumably the referees just glanced at them and waved them
through.

I wrote to the conference organizers explaining in very simple terms that it
could be easily shown the results were wrong (i.e. "please send this to the
original referees" \- easy, you would think ...) One of them was sympathetic
but said it can't be withdrawn from IEEE, and the other was like "get lost, I
don't care". It was quite an eye opener. You really don't know what this is
like until you've tried it.

I eventually wrote to the author and his work (Porton Down) saying the same
thing and the author reacted quite well. Still, the IEEE site for the papers
doesn't say anything. Just my comments on pubpeer. And that doesn't come up in
a google search. So there are still people wasting their time reading a result
known to be wrong.

[https://pubpeer.com/publications/9842D9E91821B0F7CADE333BE9D...](https://pubpeer.com/publications/9842D9E91821B0F7CADE333BE9DC7B)
[https://pubpeer.com/publications/BF67542504DA9118ECBE8869EAF...](https://pubpeer.com/publications/BF67542504DA9118ECBE8869EAF627)

The only (obvious) red flag for a potential reader is of course - it was
supposedly a very big result, so why was it at an IEEE conference instead of a
top combinatorics journal?

~~~
_delirium
The norm for conference-driven fields, I think, is that formal retractions of
proceedings papers are really only for outright misconduct, like plagiarism or
fabricated data, not for mistakes, oversights, bad experimental design, etc.
The proceedings are seen more as a record of an ongoing conversation that
continues annually [1]. If you find something wrong, misleading, incomplete,
etc. in a conference paper, the normal solution is that you write a reply
conference paper criticizing/correcting the earlier paper. This does mean that
if you dig up a paper from 10 or 20 years ago, you need to look through more
recent literature to see if anyone's published criticisms.

[1] This happens in practice in some conferences more than others of course.
There are lower-tier conferences where people just dump papers and no kind of
actual conversation or intellectual exchange is happening.

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bkandel
> It’s not Big Pharma that’s responsible for most retractions

This is not at all surprising to me. Big Pharma has teams of professional
statisticians, writers, copy-editors, fact-checkers, etc. and have much more
rigorously enforced standards than most academic research institutions. Their
bias comes out more in how they frame the study and in the choice of things
they study, but I think in general I would trust Big Pharma to be more
accurate in reporting their study results than academic labs.

~~~
yummypaint
Enjoy your thalidomide. Pharma has absolutely no intrinsic interest in
scientific integrity or integrity in general. They exist solely to make money,
and any cultivated appearance of good will is exactly that. They gobble up
scientific talent as a means to that end, but R&D will always be a cost center
for them. I would argue the massive profit-driven incentives to reach certain
results are more insidious than a small research group nearing the end of a
grant cycle. Given the historical context, it seems more likely that pharma is
just better at concealing misconduct.

~~~
bkandel
I don't think we're disagreeing, and I agree that profits rather than human
benefit drive pharma's research agenda. I'm just saying that if a paper from
Big Pharma says a factual statement like "Reference X says Y" or "X% of
patients had blood pressure of Y", I would expect Big Pharma research teams to
have done a thorough job of checking to make sure they got it right.

------
exolymph
> doing the right thing pays, which is why we created a category to recognize
> such actions and even helped start a now-moribund award, called the DIRT, to
> honor good behavior.

If the incentives are wrong, do your bit to change the incentives!

Retraction Watch is a worthy contribution to the repositories of shared
knowledge that are of so much benefit to all of us.

------
dumbneurologist
Is anyone aware of a "false positive" retraction?

Meaning a retraction that was later found to be in error, resulting in re-
publication (or whatever)?

I imagine the bar for retraction is so high it would never happen, but it
would be really interesting if it ever did.

