Last year, King College London’s professor of cognitive behaviour therapy, Trudie Chalder, published
another one of her extremely incompetent papers. This one is so statistically challenged as to be truly mind-boggling, even by Professor Chalder’s extremely low standards. A team of purportedly expert researchers has mangled descriptions of their own data so badly that the paper is rendered literally incomprehensible. When it was published, Mark Vink and Keith Geraghty tweeted about it, respectively,
here and
here.
My friend and colleague Brian Hughes, a psychology professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and I wrote a letter to the journal,
Occupational Medicine, explaining the innumeracy of the paper. Given that it is such a godawful mess, we suggested that the paper should be retracted. This was an aspirational request. And of course, that hasn’t happened.
This week, the journal published both
our letter and
the authors’ response–which is as innumerate as the paper itself. They suggest the mistakes are not disqualifying but maintain that their language in places is simply “less precise than it could have been.” This explanation is ridiculous. The phrasing they have used throughout the paper is statistically wrong—not just “imprecise.” They did suggest they are “happy to correct” the purportedly “less precise” working. Gee, thanks, Trudie!............................................
