097 - Retractions of COVID-19 Research Papers: How the Race to Find Treatments Could Mean Sloppy Science

Public Health On Call

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

News, Health & Fitness, Medicine

4.6 • 644 Ratings

🗓️ 18 June 2020

⏱️ 16 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Retractions of scientific papers happen for a number of reasons. The desperation driving COVID-19 research has brought this "nuclear option" of scientific correction to a much more public sphere. Dr. Ivan Oransky, who co-runs Retraction Watch, talks with Stephanie Desmon about what retractions typically mean—and don't mean—and how COVID-19 may incite an "existential crisis" in the scientific research community in the push to publish.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to Public Health On Call, a new podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
0:12.7	Our focus is the novel coronavirus.
0:15.2	I'm Josh Sharfstein, a faculty member at Johns Hopkins, and also a former secretary of Maryland's health department.
0:21.6	Our goal with this podcast is to bring evidence and experts to help you understand today's
0:26.9	news about the novel coronavirus and what it means for tomorrow.
0:30.5	If you have questions, you can email them to public health question at jhh.edu.
0:36.3	That's public health question at jh.hu.edu for future podcast episodes.
0:42.1	Today, Stephanie Desmond talks to Dr. Ivan Oranski, a vice president at the news site Medscape,
0:49.0	who teaches medical journalism at New York University and runs a project called Retraction Watch.
0:55.5	They discuss how the race-defined treatments for COVID-19 can lead to sloppy science and
1:01.1	what the consequences could mean.
1:04.0	Let's listen.
1:05.0	Ivan Oransky, thank you so much for being here.
1:08.0	My pleasure, Stephanie.
1:09.0	Good to be here.
1:10.0	So I want to start out with an easy
1:11.3	one. What is Retraction Watch and what is a Retraction? So Adam Marcus and I co-founded Retraction
1:18.3	Watch just about 10 years ago in August. And the reason we launched it was because of these things
1:24.4	called Retractions. Adam had been writing about a particular case of retraction,
1:28.8	and it made me realize that there were lots of stories not being told.
1:32.4	And as journalists, that's sort of a fun, important thing to do, we think.
1:36.2	And so Adam had been reporting on this case about a guy named Scott Rubin,
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.