A public health journal has retracted an article on unintentional pesticide poisonings a year after the authors enlisted a lawyer’s help to fight the decision.
Last year, we reported BMC Public Health had decided to retract the article, “The global distribution of acute unintentional pesticide poisoning: estimations based on a systematic review,” which appeared in December 2020. The article has been cited nearly 300 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, including more than 100 since the journal told the authors it would be retracted.
The authors listed affiliations with the Pesticide Action Network, a collection of organizations opposed to pesticides. In their review, they declared unintentional pesticide poisoning “a problem that warrants immediate action.”
The retraction notice cites a letter to the editor from employees of pesticide manufacturer Bayer, and the trade organization CropLife International, which criticized the analysis. The authors stood by their findings in a response, stating the critics “do not seem to have understood our estimation method.”
The authors tried to overturn the journal’s decision. In July 2023, a lawyer representing them sent the editors a letter arguing that the retraction would be “inappropriate,” as we previously reported.
In September, a journal editor wrote to the authors:
I am sorry to inform you that we will be proceeding with the retraction of your article as we have lost confidence in the conclusions presented based on the original concerns raised in the Matters Arising article by Dunn et al. and on the assessment and advice received from our Editorial Board Members.
In a rebuttal, the authors wrote:
The envisaged retraction of our paper would be an unacceptable outcome of an unacceptable process. We have explained in detail in our rebuttals that the prevalences used in our extrapolations are not higher than annual prevalences and therefore no overestimation has taken place for this reason. We have repeatedly shown that even if the criticism were correct, it would have a negligible impact on the results of our study. A retraction would therefore be contrary to the journal’s own policy, which states that retractions are not appropriate when there is inconclusive evidence to support a retraction.
The retraction notice, published Wednesday, states:
The Editor has retracted this article because concerns were raised about the use of ‘ever’ prevalence of pesticide poisoning to represent annual frequency in the extrapolations by a reader and by Dunn et al. [1]. Expert assessment has confirmed the validity of this concern and also concluded that the assumption of annual exposure for countries where the time frame is not reported is unreliable. The Editor therefore no longer has confidence in the results and conclusions presented.
All authors disagree with this retraction.
Besides citing the source of the “concerns” and registering the authors’ disagreement, the notice matches the one the journal editor proposed to the authors last May.
We asked the publisher what held up the publication of the retraction. Natalie Pafitis, senior editor of BMC Public Health, said in a statement:
While we endeavour to complete our investigations as swiftly and efficiently as possible, there are a number of reasons why these processes can, on occasion, take longer than expected.
In this instance, after readers raised concerns in January 2023, we launched an investigation into the paper in line with COPE guidelines, with support from the Springer Nature Research Integrity Group. This process included a post-publication review by several experts in the subject matter of the paper, and extensive communication with the authors. After careful consideration of both the post-publication reviews and the authors’ responses, we concluded that the most appropriate action to take was retraction of this paper.
Another group of authors has complained about the journal’s process for retractions.
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