In late January, a research paper was published by authors from The Truth Initiative and the University of Chicago which contained wholly false allegations about the New Nicotine Alliance. We have contacted the publishing journal, Sage Journals, on several occasions yet these fictitious claims have still not been corrected. We are writing this article to put on public record that the claims by the study’s authors are fundamentally untrue, and that the process to correct them has been unduly slow.
We first contacted Sage Journals on 21 February, writing the following letter to alert them to the false statements which had been published on their pages.
Upon receiving no reply, we wrote again on two separate occasions to reinforce that incorrect statements had been left online for two months “with each passing day having the potential to cause further reputational damage to our charity.” We also copied in the Editor-in-Chief and the Deputy Editor-in-Chief in an attempt to elevate the issue.
We finally received a reply on 31 March from the Research Integrity Manager stating that they take “research integrity concerns very seriously”, and that our complaint was being “actively investigated.” We have had no communication from them since then.
For comparison, the last time such falsehoods were published by a journal, it was rectified within 10 days.
We find it unacceptable that entirely inaccurate and unfounded material should remain in a published study for over three months and would question whether this matter is being “actively investigated.” We are also curious as to why an organisation calling itself The Truth Initiative should be content with totally untrue information being promoted under its name, more than two months after we alerted the journal of the errors.
We have pointed out in our correspondence that “it should not take a responsible research journal this long to correct such blatant mistakes.”
We are heartened that our efforts seem to be such a threat to those opposed to harm reduction that they resort to such underhand tactics, but there can be no excuse for the delay in correcting demonstrably fictitious assertions.
Therefore, we wish to make it clear, once again, that there are no grounds whatsoever for these claims and that the authors and their chosen journal are abrogating their responsibilities to present accurate information.