Pediatrics Editors Claim Compliance with – But Instead Violate Publication Ethics Guidelines

In previous blog posts I described how Pediatrics editors refused to retract a fatally flawed study by University of California San Francisco authors (here and here).  I also described how they allowed publication of unsubstantiated ad hominem attacks, then tried to cover them up by scrubbing the journal website (here). 

Carl Phillips afforded the editors a chance to account for their unprofessional actions in an article at The Daily Vaper (here).  They responded by saying that their actions were consistent with the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines for journals.  This is demonstrably false.  The editors violated three of the guidelines (available here).

The COPE guidelines say that “Editors are accountable and should take responsibility for everything they publish.” 

However, instead of taking responsibility for publishing an ad hominem attack, they simply erased the attack from the Pediatrics website with no retraction or apology (here).  To make matters worse, they also deleted another comment by Bates and colleagues (here), which violated another COPE principle:

“Editors should adopt editorial policies that encourage maximum transparency and complete, honest reporting.”

Carl Phillips described another instance of zero transparency:

“During the dispute over the comments, the editors informed Rodu that they were commissioning an independent ‘expert’ review of the dispute. Clearly there was no genuinely expert review, because that would have concluded that Rodu was right and Chaffee’s comment was nonsense. The editors did not post the review to the comments thread, as they should have, and refused a request by The Daily Vaper to see a copy of it.”

Finally, as Phillips and I have documented in detail, the Pediatrics editors violated a third principle:

“Editors should guard the integrity of the published record by issuing corrections and retractions when needed and pursuing suspected or alleged research and publication misconduct.”

The original manuscript from Benjamin W. Chaffee, Shannon Lea Watkins, and Stanton A. Glantz was never retracted after it was clearly demonstrated to be deficient, and the Pediatrics editors – Drs. Lewis First (University of Vermont), Alex Kemper (Nationwide Children’s Hospital, Columbus Ohio) and Mark Neuman (Harvard) – are guilty of publication misconduct.

Pediatrics Journal Ignores Its Stated Editorial Standards

The journal Pediatrics in March published an article by University of California San Francisco’s Benjamin Chaffee, Shannon Lea Watkins and Stanton Glantz claiming that e-cigarettes lead to smoking. The claim was baseless; the authors ignored subjects’ past smoking activity, as I explained in an earlier blog post (here).

On March 15, I submitted a comment to the journal with a re-analysis of Chaffee’s data using the omitted variable and demonstrating the invalidity of Chaffee’s claim.  On the basis of this flaw, I requested retraction of the article. 

Our comment was published on the Pediatrics website March 30, along with a response from Chaffee et al. that further validated a retraction (here).  Their response included an attack on my independence, veracity and transparency.  Clive Bates, David Sweanor, David Abrams and Raymond Niaura endorsed our analysis in an April 11 comment, labeling Chaffee’s response “inadequate, disappointing and surprising.”  They pointed out that it was “disappointing because the authors, apparently with the approval of the journal, have resorted to an ad hominem attack on Rodu and without showing any improper conduct or incomplete disclosure.” 

I had responded to the attack by Chaffee et al. with an email to the Pediatrics editors on April 9:

“Chaffee et al. stated that my ‘financial ties to the tobacco industry are much more extensive than the posted disclosures suggest.’ This is false, defamatory and potentially libelous on two accounts, alleging that I made an inadequate disclosure, and that I have more ‘financial ties.’ My disclosure was accurate and complete. In addition, the website they cited contains no supporting evidence for their allegation, because I have no other financial ties or conflicts of interest. The journal has specific policies prohibiting both defamatory/libelous comments and weblinks. These policies also provide guidance for your immediate attention to this matter.” (here)

On or about April 24, Pediatrics published a revised response from Chaffee et al.  Their fictitious claims about “financial ties” had disappeared, but the revised text carried the same date as the authors’ original comment.  The editors failed to indicate a correction had been made, and that erroneous and disparaging remarks had been removed.  The editors had allowed the libelous statements to remain on the journal site for nearly a month; the offending remarks are still available elsewhere on the Internet (here).

The editors violated the journal’s stated policy: “Once a comment has been posted on the website, you will not have the right to have it removed or edited… Be sure to follow all of the consideration criteria below; you will not be able to modify your comment after submission.” (emphasis in original)

Compounding this journalistic failure, the editors encouraged Clive Bates and colleagues to edit their published comment and delete language countering Chaffee et al.’s defamatory remarks.  When Bates did not immediately comply, the editors deleted the entire Bates comment.  However, it is still available here.

Journal editors Drs. Lewis First (University of Vermont), Alex Kemper (Nationwide Children’s Hospital, Columbus Ohio) and Mark Neuman (Harvard) owe Pediatrics readers full compliance with their journal’s editorial standards, including a detailed correction notice and republication of the full text of the Bates et al. comment.

Another UC San Francisco E-Cigarette Gateway Claim, Based on Tiny Numbers

Last week I called for retraction of a flawed study by University of California San Francisco’s Benjamin W. Chaffee, Shannon Lea Watkins and Stanton A. Glantz that appeared in the journal Pediatrics (here and here).  

Once again using the FDA Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) survey, the same authors exaggerated the gateway effect of e-cigarettes, hookah and smokeless tobacco in a January JAMA Pediatrics article (here).  I criticized at that time the omission of information that would have provided context for their findings (here).  The exaggerations were amplified in the media.

In an interview with National Public Radio (here), Dr. Watkins failed to note the minuscule numbers used in her study to support the gateway claim.  I have inserted those numbers in bold in her quote, here:

“We found that kids who tried e-cigarettes [n=11] or hookah [n=8] or smokeless tobacco [n=3] or cigars [n=7] – any noncigarette tobacco product – were all twice as likely to try cigarettes a year later compared to kids who hadn’t used any of those other tobacco products [n=175].  Kids who were using two or more noncigarette products [n=15] were four times as likely to report using cigarettes a year later.” (I have confirmed these numbers in the FDA data; they are in the table below)

Dr. Watkins added the extraordinary claim that trying one tobacco product changes one’s perception of cigarettes: “Using these products might change a kid’s perception of the harm of cigarettes, and so they are perceived as less dangerous and they get used to using tobacco and so using conventional cigarettes is not so scary or ‘bad’.”

In her view, trying a tobacco product causes one to change friends: “It will expose them to different kinds of kids, maybe kids that are already using conventional cigarettes, and then they might go on to try them.”

Instead of sharing her conjecture on how e-cigarettes led 11 children to begin smoking, Dr. Watkins should have focused on the fact that 80% of the 219 new smokers [n=175] in her study had not previously used any tobacco product.

Odds Ratios And Numbers of Teens Smoking Cigarettes After One Year, According to Ever Tobacco Status at Baseline
Ever Tobacco Status- Baseline (n)	Odds Ratio	Number Smoking At One Year (%)
Never tobacco use (9,058)	Referent	175 (79.9)
E-cigarettes (255)	2.12	11 (5.0)
Hookah (189)	2.15	8 (3.7)
Other combustible (114)	3.08	7 (3.2)
Smokeless tobacco (93)	1.53	3 (1.4)
Two or more products (200)	3.81	15 (6.8)
All (9,909)		219 (100)