The Journal of Vascular Surgery says it will retract a paper about surgeons’ social media posts that said health care professionals who posted pictures of themselves in bikinis were engaging in “potentially unprofessional” behavior — and led to a firestorm on Twitter yesterday.
As Medscape reported yesterday before the retraction:
Medical professionals are tweeting pictures of themselves in swimsuits with the hashtag #MedBikini, accompanied by sharp rebukes of a study that labeled such images on social media as “potentially unprofessional.”
Here’s how the authors — surgeons at Boston University Medical Center — summarized their work:
- Key Findings: Among 480 young vascular surgeons, there were 235, nearly one-half, with publicly identifiable social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Sixty-one (26%) account holders had unprofessional or potentially unprofessional content. Unprofessional content was more frequent in those self-identified as vascular surgeons (33% vs 17%; P = .007).
- Take Home Message: Young surgeons should be aware of the permanent public exposure of unprofessional content that can be accessed by peers, patients, and current/future employers.
The paper was published online in December and appears in the August 2020 issue of the journal. An example of yesterday’s reaction:
Two of the paper’s authors — Jeffrey Siracuse and Thomas Cheng — apologized for the paper on Twitter. Siracuse’s Twitter account appears to have since been deleted.
Last night, at about 9 p.m. US Eastern time, in a statement posted to Twitter, the journal acknowledged the firestorm and said it was retracting the paper:
The journal had also published an editorial alongside the paper.
This would not be the first time a surgery journal has retracted a paper for reasons involving unconscious bias.
(Disclosure: Ivan Oransky is vice president of editorial at Medscape. He and Alison Abritis were co-authors, with two of the authors of the paper discussed above, on an unrelated 2018 paper about retractions of surgical papers.)
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There are two additional abstracts haven’t been retracted:
https://www.jvascsurg.org/article/S0741-5214(18)30730-4/fulltext
https://www.jvascsurg.org/article/S0741-5214(19)30015-1/fulltext
Well, what was the evidence of unprofessional behavior in the paper?
One for the Ig Nobel prizes.
Just imagine all the docs dancing and singing in swimming costumes a la Esther Williams in “Dangerous When Wet (1953).”
Or does having the article retracted nullify the award?
The paper, the prior two abstracts, and the editorial are all up on the journal’s website. No flags about the article being retracted and no link to the Editor’s Statement. The paper is therefore benefiting from engagement (hits, downloads) despite the massive outcry and decision to retract.
As usual, the right wing snowflakes come out in force whining about poor quality papers being retracted that just happen to support their fragile egos. Pathetic.