David Tuller: Trial by Error: Open Letter to The Lancet, version 3.0

At least they can't use "Oh yeah? You and whose army?" any more.

 

I've written about the statement to COPE on the school absence study. I've also seen the COPE statement on the registration issue, and it does sound similar to the LP study. But the dates are off. Maybe they did that to disguise it? It would be excellent to have more groups from poorly represented countries, as well as more experts.

 

I worked on an insert magazine that went into copies of The Sunday Telegraph and another in The Guardian. I think it was about £15k for 10,000 32-page A5 booklets to go inside, but I could have completely made that up!

 

Yeah, my guess is that his was to 'anonymise' it.

 

Not a cheap price, but not completely insane.
It does not have to be a booklet, an advertisement or editorial might be good enough?
Would a paper include it if it was sent as a letter to the editor (do they still do that)?

 

But I don't get that. Is that standard in COPE submissions? Why bother moving dates around by months here or there? Doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I mean, it certainly sounds like a similar case. But why would they bother to submit it to COPE at all?

 

If the dates were exactly those from SMILE then it would be 100% clear that the 'anonymised' text referred to SMILE. Also, you've previously written on a COPE case so maybe they'd be a bit extra cautious?

So that they can disperse responsibility for failing to follow their own rules?

 

Possibly. Depends how strict the ad department is. For a one-page ad that goes in every copy of a paper the price might actually be much higher, because it circulation is likely to be 100,000s rather than 10,000s.

 

Does it need to be a whole page?

 

Not necessarily. It's not a bad idea. Someone should look into the costs.

 

This really looks like high-quality oversight.

These were the issues raised:
"The authors have admitted honest error with full explanations."
"...this is an important educative role, but does not remedy that the trial data are in the public domain and are misleading."

So the journal seems to be facing serious problems regarding this paper. The authors admitted the errors.

This is the Forum's reply

This seems to be a very mild reaction to something that is called "misleading".

@Esther12, how do you know this is about SMILE?

 

It just sounds a lot like it. I could be wrong.

Maybe I did jump to conclusions a bit... it sounds a lot like it though. I feel like their BS recommendations made me think it was particularly likely to be Crawley!

 

Ok, I see.