What Caught Our Attention: When researchers set out to study hepatitis B among women in rural China, and they wanted to know if the women had been vaccinated against the virus, they simply asked them. While that can sometimes be useful, apparently it was a mistake in this case, as the reliance on patient memory injected too much doubt into these findings.
Journal: Paediatric and Perinatal Epidemiology
Authors: Qiongjie Zhou, Xiaotian Li, Qiaomei Wang, Haiping Shen, Yiping Zhang, Shikun Zhang, Ganesh Acharya
Affiliations: Fudan University, China; The Arctic University of Norway, Norway; Shanghai Key Laboratory of Female Reproductive Endocrine-Related Diseases, China; National Health and Family Planning Commission of the People’s Republic of China, China; Karolinska Institute, Sweden
The above manuscript, published online on 15 June 2017 in Wiley Online Library (http://wileyonlinelibrary.com), has been retracted by agreement between the authors, Cande V. Ananth, the Editor-in-Chief of Paediatric and Perinatal Epidemiology, and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. The retraction has been made at the request of the authors since the data collected from self-report of the HBV vaccination remains unverified, and potentially subject to errors.
Date of Article: June 2017
Times Cited, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science: 1
Date of Notice: September 20, 2017
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As I understand from the story highlited here, the result is mainly based on self-reported vaccination uptake. I believe, eventhough it is not confirmatory approach or subject to recall bias, it is alsocheaper option to determine the vaccination uptake. I feel the authors made a mistake to retract this paper or there is something behind which is not covered in this story.