The BMJ has released the names of an outside expert panel who will decide the fate of two articles that are the subject of a heated dispute.
As previously reported, last week the BMJ published a correction to two papers published last year, explaining that both papers had inaccurately overstated the incidence of the adverse effects of statins. However, a fierce critic of the papers, the head of the Cholesterol Treatment Trialists’ (CTT) Collaboration, Rory Collins, still insisted upon a full retraction. In an editorial published in BMJ, the journal’s editor-in-chief, Fiona Godlee, wrote that she was uncertain “whether the error is sufficient for retraction, given that the incorrect statements were in each case secondary to the article’s primary focus.” As a result the BMJ has convened an outside panel of experts “with no dog in this fight.”
Iona Heath, former chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners and of The BMJ’s ethics committee, will be the chair of the panel. There are six additional members…
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