Editor and authors refuse to share data from article with alleged statistical errors – Retraction Watch

Last July, David Allison and his students identified what they considered fatal errors in a paper in the journal Elsevier. Diabetes Research and Clinical Practice.

The paper's authors, led by Sergio Di Molfetta of the University of Bari Aldo Moro in Bari, Italy, used a cluster randomized controlled trial but performed inappropriate statistical analysis, according to Allison's group .

In August, Allison, dean of the School of Public Health at Indiana University in Bloomington, and colleagues requested the authors' data.

Then they hit a wall.

Over the next three months, Allison – who said she was working to contribute to the “regular reproducibility, transparency and reliability of science” – and her colleagues sent emails to the authors, explaining why they were requesting the data. . They copied Antonio Cerellio, the journal's editor-in-chief, in an email asking him to respect the journal's policy on data sharing.

In November, in an email seen by Retraction Watch, Francesco Giorgino, the paper's corresponding author, said sharing data with a third party would violate study participant consent and EU privacy rules. Datas.

The statistical analysis suggested by Allison's group would be “probably biased” since there were only 23 patients in the study, Giorgino said. However, “some descriptive steps in the statistical analysis may have been inadvertently omitted,” he said, because the authors thought they were too detailed for a pilot study. Giorgino did not respond to our request for comment.

In April, Allison's group submitted a letter critical of the article to the journal. This letter was rejected in May by Cerellio because “the document cannot be assigned sufficient priority to allow its publication.” Olivia Robertson, a postdoctoral fellow in Allison's group, emailed Cerellio urging it to reconsider publishing the manuscript to correct the paper's errors.

In an email seen by Retraction Watch, Cerellio responded:

I think it's time to stop this endless story. You were in contact with the authors, who raised several legal questions. From the journal's perspective, considering that the article has gone through a comprehensive review process and we do not intend to engage in a legal issue, the issue stops now. If you continue to have concerns, you can take the perpetrators to court.

Cerellio did not respond to our request for comment.

Allison and her group have not heard from the editor since that response and said they did not know what “legal issues” Cerellio may have been referring to.

“We are disappointed that the publisher and original authors of the study were not more responsive and committed to maintaining the accuracy and integrity of the science by correcting the errors we identified, but we continue nonetheless moving forward,” Robertson said. “Unfortunately, this is not the first time our group has received an unfavorable response.”

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