[HN Gopher] Many scientists citing two scandalous Covid-19 paper...
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Many scientists citing two scandalous Covid-19 papers ignore their
retractions
Author : YeGoblynQueenne
Score : 83 points
Date : 2021-01-16 15:59 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sciencemag.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sciencemag.org)
| jansan wrote:
| So why is not every paper that cites a retracted paper
| automatically flagged? THe peer reviewing process seems to have a
| lot of room for improvement.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Citing a paper doesn't imply you think it's either good or bad.
| You have to read the text to understand what the authors say
| about it.
| yawnxyz wrote:
| editors and peer reviewers really need to do a better job
| flagging citations of retracted papers...
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Again, the issue is not the citation... it's what the
| citation is used to do. If an historian cites Mein Kampf
| it's not because they're agreeing with it, is it?
| jjk166 wrote:
| If a historian cites Mein Kampf, they're using it as a
| primary source - they might not agree with the opinions
| expressed within but they do believe Hitler expressed
| those opinions.
|
| 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.
| jansan wrote:
| Mein Kapmpf is not a scientific paper that can be
| retracted. Or have I messed some recent developments?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > Mein Kapmpf is not a scientific paper that can be
| retracted.
|
| I didn't say it was.
|
| > Or have I messed some recent developments?
|
| Why are you being sarcastic?
| jansan wrote:
| _> Why are you being sarcastic?_
|
| It's my nature.
| ta988 wrote:
| flagging doesnt mean forbidding, just a warning to make sure
| everybody is aware.
| [deleted]
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| Because the way papers are reviewed is highly manual and relies
| on individual reviewers who are acting as volunteers and don't
| work full time doing review work. This makes it very difficult
| to implement systematic checks of the sort that would catch
| minor pieces of retracted work that aren't central to this
| paper's results. To fix this systematically you'd either need
| automated systems or human-executed "checkbox processes" with
| training.
|
| 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.
| jansan wrote:
| Science needs a standardized and open reviewing and
| publishing process. The current reviewing process may have
| been alright in the 80s, not so anymore.
|
| Bill Gates, are you litening? This is a chance to
| revolutionize science!!!
| mhkool wrote:
| The biggest scandal so far: a retraction paper for the SARS-
| CoV-19 PCR test was submitted in November 2020 but ignored so
| far. The retraction paper is here:
| https://cormandrostenreview.com/report/
| FabHK wrote:
| Nonsense. So, here's what happened:
|
| Drosten, Corman et al. from the Charite (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.
| eisstrom wrote:
| I just checked the twitter account of the first author (who
| does not seem to be currently affiliated with any scientific
| institution). I can only understand his German and English
| tweets. He likes to push his own book, retweeted a post
| claiming "just stop testing for the virus and people will die
| of influenza again", and calls other peoples work
| pseudoscience.
| mhkool wrote:
| Why don't you talk about the 10 points that the scientists
| state to argue that the test is flawed? And what do you have
| to say about the other 21 scientists? What do you have to say
| about the former Pfizer chief scientist which is co-author?
| morsch wrote:
| Here's a fairly exhaustive rebuttal: https://mobile.twitter
| .com/BMauschen/status/1333466298072911...
|
| 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...
| gus_massa wrote:
| Autotranlation for the lazy: https://translate.google.com
| /translate?hl=&sl=auto&tl=en&u=h...
|
| (For the lazier, the technical discussion starts at the
| 12th tweet.)
| bigcorp-slave wrote:
| This appears to be a totally unrelated set of authors
| attempting to force a journal to retract someone else's paper.
| They literally have a dedicated website to promote this
| retraction and if you look up the authors, some of them
| headline their Twitter with it. The first author just today
| posted on Twitter that mRNA vaccines can alter your DNA.
|
| 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.
| briandear wrote:
| Is the retracted paper correct? That's the only question that
| matters. And perhaps those scientists have developed their
| views by actually looking at the science? Is that possible?
| Don't shoot the messenger.
| morsch wrote:
| There is no retracted paper. Like the GP correctly points
| out, this is a website designed to pressure another group
| to retract their paper. The authors of said paper have not
| retracted it, although there were minor addendums (none of
| them in response to the website, I hasten to add).
|
| The paper in question -- _Detection of 2019 novel
| coronavirus (2019-nCoV) by real-time RT-PCR_ [1][2] --, was
| the first paper (as far as I know, one of the first,
| certainly) outlining a protocol for a PCR test protocol for
| Sars-CoV-2, back in January 2020. In other words, these
| were among the first people who documented a way to detect
| whether a sample represented Sars-CoV-2. The authors have
| previously published about other coronaviruses like Sars-
| CoV-1 and MERS, e.g. [3] appears at first glance to be a
| well received paper. Here's [4] their paper on the
| detection of Sars-CoV-1 (or, back then, just Sars-CoV) via
| PCR.
|
| [1] https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7
| 917.E...
|
| [2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=14452026284756
| 05806...
|
| [3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0065
| 35271...
|
| [4] https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/ese.17
| .39.2...
| sndean wrote:
| >> A lead author of the paper, biomathematician Maik Pietzner at
| the University of Cambridge, said that although the paper was
| submitted after the retractions occurred, it was written
| beforehand, and "the current pandemic requires immediate
| response." However, the paper was published 4 months after its
| submission.
|
| 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...
| ta988 wrote:
| Zotero, a Free citation manager will tell you when a paper is
| retracted. it will also tell you (with a plugin this time) if
| it is discussed on pubpeer.
| netizen-9748 wrote:
| that's a feature I was unaware of. I used EndNote for a while
| but I don't know if they also offer this service. Is Zotero
| the only one that does this? That's an insanely helpful
| feature for research
| stareatgoats wrote:
| I believe https://scite.ai/ has a similar service (might
| have to pay USD 15/month for it though)
|
| Discussed on HN here
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23146091
| mellosouls wrote:
| This lack of timely response due to missing the retraction
| might be understandable in normal circumstances but it's
| difficult to see how any researchers in the area were unaware
| of these retractions as the scandal was major news outside of
| the field.
| samizdis wrote:
| Here is a list of retracted Covid-19 papers, as collated by
| Retraction Watch:
|
| https://retractionwatch.com/retracted-coronavirus-covid-19-p...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| It would be nice if retraction watch publicly messaged those
| who cite retracted papers and publicly logged their responses.
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