ICER 2012 Day 2 Discussion Papers Session 2

This is a brief note on this session as these papers are presented to the community with the intention of sparking discussion and, in this case, one of the most interesting issues that arose was the use for reference of the first of a pair of papers, where the first paper asserted a finding and the second then retracted it. This is not to say that the actual papers presented themselves weren’t interesting (far from it) but you can read about them in the proceedings and this particular session raised yet another reason to come to ICER: because this is where a lot of the authors are.

In this case, one of the authors on the retraction paper very politely identified himself and then pointed out why the paper in question that the presenting authors were referring to had then been followed-up with a paper that illustrated some of the problems in the original work. (I am trying quite hard to avoid potentially embarrassing anyone so please excuse how circumspect I am being.)

The reception of the actual discussion paper was, unsurprisingly, framed in the revelation that a supporting paper had been undermined and the questions revolved around issues with metrics and how the authors had addressed the (so-called) possible Hawthorne effect issues.

But this is exactly what these kind of paper sessions are for. This is a place to present ideas for the community and now the authors can go back, rework their approach on stronger soil and come back with something stronger. Yes, there is no doubt that they would much rather have not built upon that paper but imagine how much worse it would have been had this made it (undetected) to the journal stage!