Title: Patient Education After CABG: Are We Teaching the Wrong Information?
What Caught Our Attention: We’ve written about the controversy surrounding a commonly used tool to measure whether patients are sticking to their drug regimen, known as the Morisky Medication Adherence Scale (MMAS-8). It can cost thousands of dollars — and using it without payment/permission earns researchers a call from a collector, who has used legal threats to compel multiple teams to withdraw their papers (a phenomenon we wrote about in Science). The creator of the tool argues it’s copyrighted, and demanding fees ensures researchers use it properly, which avoids putting patients at risk. We’ve found a notice (paywalled, tsk-tsk) that reveals another group of authors used the tool without permission and, according to the notice, “incorrectly.”
Journal: Circulation
Authors: Corey Bradley, Madelyn Burkart, and Ravi Agarwala
Affiliations: Wake Forest University, NC, USA
For the American Heart Association’s 2016 Scientific Sessions abstract #13254 by Corey Bradley, Madelyn Burkart, and Ravi Agarwala (“Patient Education After CABG: Are We Teaching the Wrong Information?” Circulation. 2016;134(suppl 1):A13254), the authors would like to retract this abstract due to errors in the analysis. There was a licensing issue with the MMAS-8 but, more importantly, the analysis of MMAS-8 data was incorrectly performed. These errors were not intentional. The authors sincerely regret these errors and apologize for any inconvenience they cause.
Date of Article: November 2016
Times Cited, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science: Zero
Date of Notice: 12/18/2017
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It’s advisable to use approved research tools on the condition that they provide authentic and reliable information that are not misleading. However Authors will have to go through normal procedures to achieve this to avoid unnecessary penalties.