The editor: “The journal decided when it first started publishing the article type ‘that the cases should be fictional to protect patient confidentiality.’”
They just didn't feel the need to mention that in the journal, but it was for the children, see?
Yeah, they seem to have been quite sloppy with these vignettes.
Thought note that in the situation of the mislabeled real case, the formal solution is could be a retraction of the entire highlight article since it is against the (poorly implemented) policy to have a real case study.
Don't know how patient consent for being used in a case study works, did this author get a perpetual license, did they just copy something from another article they wrote, or from an article someone else wrote?
Speaking this as a spouse of a medical doctor -- case reports are sometimes a good way to increase the bullet point count in your CV if you are a medical resident. A lot of residents do that just for the sake of beefing up their CVs (to apply for fellowship for example).
Too late, it's already in the bloodstream, LLMs will be recommending things to pediatric doctors and families from fabricated archives for years, probably.
I think this is mainly a case of the common "didn't notice when crucial literature for own published content was retracted, get caught with pants down when the replication police come knocking".
Obviously the poor labelling is bad, but 9 bad citations per year isn't the end of science and better labelling wouldn't discourage all the lazy authors who chose to cite these highlight articles, it'll just shift whos is to blame.
The real problem is hosting a review article about research that was retracted, and it sounds like they aren't moving very quickly on taking that piece down.
This is fine, though somewhat belated. But it does nothing to deal with the public's growing distrust of science in general, and medical science in particular.
> The articles usually start with a case description followed by “learning points” that include statistics, clinical observations and data from CPSP.
I can see the reason where fictional cases could be used here as teaching aid - based on real cases/ilnesses but simplified to make the learning points succinctly, but surely if the cases are being cited elsewhere someone should have raised the issue earlier?
Since it was for teaching I expect the case studies were always showing typical features of real cases, so there's nothing in the case vignette itself to give it away unless the author picks a funny name or something like that.
Rather it would be the entire form of these short highlight articles that would make you keep searching for a proper citation, unless you're lazy or pressed for time.
Wouldn't citing actual cases be a HIPAA violation? I can see why they would invent example cases, based on real ones, especially if they are fairly pedestrian cases.
I mean. Except if your pedestrian example does not reflect reality, then that is bad.
Would it be easier, though? Medical records (in the US) are covered by HIPAA and, to my knowledge, there is no anonymized canonical record, similar to what we have for legal decision. Without that, how difficult would it be to just "make shit up"?
Obviously just sending it via email to the reviewers works just fine in practice anyway, the problem is really that they published a summary piece about research that was later retracted, but didn't take down their own article.
out of context that makes sense...but in the context of a case report how do you implement that? The patients have privacy rights and the authors/doctors have a responsibliity to protect them. That doesn't justify this but it does force a conversation about what 'every single data point' means. Does it mean the patient's real name and social security number? their complete medical chart?
Case reports are descriptive not determinative and should be treated as such by other scholars. They are 'I saw this' not 'this is generalizably true'. They can (and often are) replicated or countered but they are not per se research as you are thinking about it. Whether it is fictitious or not, other scholars should be cautious in citing them as proof/evidence in papers that fit into the 'research' mold.
From a legal perspective, journal article authors can implement this by following the official HHS guidance for de-identification. This applies to any use of protected health information (PHI), not just case reports.
I don't mind the fact that the case reports were fictional -- actual cases can be problematic in terms of privacy as it may be easy to ascertain the patient's identity from the details -- but not putting a notice that it was fictional (or altered from a real case for privacy), for teaching purposes, is pretty bad.
The detail that makes this more than a labeling error: the fictional nature appeared in the journal's author guidelines, not in the published articles. Researchers who cited these 61 papers had no way to distinguish them from genuine case reports. 218 citations later, the fiction is embedded in secondary analyses and literature reviews written by people who had no idea.
The "Baby Boy Blue" (2010) case is the clearest example of the harm. An infant allegedly exposed to opioids through breast milk. That case influenced clinical guidance on codeine safety in nursing for years. The CARE guidelines (Consensus-based Clinical Case Reporting Guidelines) exist specifically to create transparency in case reporting. They're voluntary, which is how a journal can run a 25-year undisclosed fiction program and technically say the authors knew.
There is not good evidence that peer review improves quality and there is perhaps some to the contrary (many predatory journals are peer reviewed).
The arxiv (unreviewed) is among the most reliable sources available.
Yeah, it's almost like science is better when the scientific method is applied to everything, instead of delegating validation to some third party based on credentials or authority or social status.
Peer review is a sniff test. It cannot guarantee that the results are correct and the conclusions are right. It is just designed to limit some kinds of errors. Replication is important.
The editor: “The journal decided when it first started publishing the article type ‘that the cases should be fictional to protect patient confidentiality.’”
They just didn't feel the need to mention that in the journal, but it was for the children, see?
What a mess.
> One author of a case report was surprised to learn of the correction — because the case described in her article is true.
So they managed to mess up even the correction of their giant mess.
> correcting the correction "would be difficult."
I bet. That's why they should have got it right in the first place. I would be absolutely ballistic if they would be libelling my work like that.
Yeah, they seem to have been quite sloppy with these vignettes.
Thought note that in the situation of the mislabeled real case, the formal solution is could be a retraction of the entire highlight article since it is against the (poorly implemented) policy to have a real case study.
Don't know how patient consent for being used in a case study works, did this author get a perpetual license, did they just copy something from another article they wrote, or from an article someone else wrote?
Speaking this as a spouse of a medical doctor -- case reports are sometimes a good way to increase the bullet point count in your CV if you are a medical resident. A lot of residents do that just for the sake of beefing up their CVs (to apply for fellowship for example).
[delayed]
Too late, it's already in the bloodstream, LLMs will be recommending things to pediatric doctors and families from fabricated archives for years, probably.
It’s all an hallucination.
I think this is mainly a case of the common "didn't notice when crucial literature for own published content was retracted, get caught with pants down when the replication police come knocking".
Obviously the poor labelling is bad, but 9 bad citations per year isn't the end of science and better labelling wouldn't discourage all the lazy authors who chose to cite these highlight articles, it'll just shift whos is to blame.
The real problem is hosting a review article about research that was retracted, and it sounds like they aren't moving very quickly on taking that piece down.
This is fine, though somewhat belated. But it does nothing to deal with the public's growing distrust of science in general, and medical science in particular.
They had access to ChatGPT for last 25 years!
> The articles usually start with a case description followed by “learning points” that include statistics, clinical observations and data from CPSP.
I can see the reason where fictional cases could be used here as teaching aid - based on real cases/ilnesses but simplified to make the learning points succinctly, but surely if the cases are being cited elsewhere someone should have raised the issue earlier?
Since it was for teaching I expect the case studies were always showing typical features of real cases, so there's nothing in the case vignette itself to give it away unless the author picks a funny name or something like that.
Rather it would be the entire form of these short highlight articles that would make you keep searching for a proper citation, unless you're lazy or pressed for time.
Wouldn't citing actual cases be a HIPAA violation? I can see why they would invent example cases, based on real ones, especially if they are fairly pedestrian cases.
I mean. Except if your pedestrian example does not reflect reality, then that is bad.
In the era of GitHub etc, if you're not giving out every single data point of your research, it should be assumed it's fake.
The article is about case reports, not about empirical studies. Putting a fake case report on GitHub wouldn't make it any less fake.
> Putting a fake case report on GitHub wouldn't make it any less fake.
Much easier to review for whomever wants to review it.
Would it be easier, though? Medical records (in the US) are covered by HIPAA and, to my knowledge, there is no anonymized canonical record, similar to what we have for legal decision. Without that, how difficult would it be to just "make shit up"?
Do you know what a case report is?
Obviously just sending it via email to the reviewers works just fine in practice anyway, the problem is really that they published a summary piece about research that was later retracted, but didn't take down their own article.
And then there be large amounts of fake data for the next generation of AIs to learn from.
What is stopping anyone from faking the data they use in their research papers?
Sure it might be verifiable but if the data was made to give the desired results, i.e. faked to be what is required for the paper.
out of context that makes sense...but in the context of a case report how do you implement that? The patients have privacy rights and the authors/doctors have a responsibliity to protect them. That doesn't justify this but it does force a conversation about what 'every single data point' means. Does it mean the patient's real name and social security number? their complete medical chart?
Case reports are descriptive not determinative and should be treated as such by other scholars. They are 'I saw this' not 'this is generalizably true'. They can (and often are) replicated or countered but they are not per se research as you are thinking about it. Whether it is fictitious or not, other scholars should be cautious in citing them as proof/evidence in papers that fit into the 'research' mold.
From a legal perspective, journal article authors can implement this by following the official HHS guidance for de-identification. This applies to any use of protected health information (PHI), not just case reports.
https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/special-topics/d...
The IRB for a particular organization can impose additional restrictions.
Original HN discussion about the case:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46789205
I don't mind the fact that the case reports were fictional -- actual cases can be problematic in terms of privacy as it may be easy to ascertain the patient's identity from the details -- but not putting a notice that it was fictional (or altered from a real case for privacy), for teaching purposes, is pretty bad.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jpc.14206
Maybe we should revisit the routine practice of infant male genital mutilation?
“Pics or it didn’t happen,” goes a long way in my book.
The detail that makes this more than a labeling error: the fictional nature appeared in the journal's author guidelines, not in the published articles. Researchers who cited these 61 papers had no way to distinguish them from genuine case reports. 218 citations later, the fiction is embedded in secondary analyses and literature reviews written by people who had no idea.
The "Baby Boy Blue" (2010) case is the clearest example of the harm. An infant allegedly exposed to opioids through breast milk. That case influenced clinical guidance on codeine safety in nursing for years. The CARE guidelines (Consensus-based Clinical Case Reporting Guidelines) exist specifically to create transparency in case reporting. They're voluntary, which is how a journal can run a 25-year undisclosed fiction program and technically say the authors knew.
Doesn't sound like these works were "full" articles, but rather something more like short review articles.
I think research should be assumed fiction until it’s peer reviewed.
There is not good evidence that peer review improves quality and there is perhaps some to the contrary (many predatory journals are peer reviewed). The arxiv (unreviewed) is among the most reliable sources available.
Yeah, it's almost like science is better when the scientific method is applied to everything, instead of delegating validation to some third party based on credentials or authority or social status.
What do you suggest instead? Certainly not giving up I hope.
I think it's a bit different considering the goal was a teaching tool of well recognised conditions
>all or almost all were cases of very well recognized conditions [...] where a single case report would not generate any interest or ever be cited.
That is an ironic proviso given that the article clearly states
"The peer-reviewed articles don’t state anywhere the cases described are fictional."
Peer review by peers who are trained by non-replicable science is not helpful...
Independently replicated. Reviewed says pretty much nothing.
Peer review is a sniff test. It cannot guarantee that the results are correct and the conclusions are right. It is just designed to limit some kinds of errors. Replication is important.
Case studies can't be replicated. They aren't experiments.
Tough to replicate an isolated case study?