alt Hacker News> The corrections come following a January article in New Yorker magazine that mentioned one of the reports — “Baby boy blue,” ... was made up.
> “Based on the New Yorker article, we made the decision to add a correction notice to all 138 publications..."
Emphasis mine.
Replies
crummy • yesterday at 9:42 PM
> While the instructions for authors for Paediatrics & Child Health has at times indicated the case reports are fictional, that disclosure has never appeared on the journal articles themselves.
Sounds like they were asking authors for fiction, so probably plenty of them are.
Sure, if you emphasize selectively you can make it sound like it says that. Here are some other quotes from the article that clearly refute your interpretation:
> The journal decided when it first started publishing the article type “that the cases should be fictional to protect patient confidentiality,”
> While the instructions for authors for Paediatrics & Child Health has at times indicated the case reports are fictional, that disclosure has never appeared on the journal articles themselves.
> “The editor acknowledged that the editorial team is at fault for overlooking the fact that our case was real during the review process,”
It's pretty clear that the journal always thought of these as fictional vignettes, and either didn't realize or didn't care that that had not made that sufficiently clear to the readers. The New Yorker article clued them into the fact that it was a problem, so they added the correction to all of their case studies to clarify that they were intended to be fictional. In (at least) one case, the author also didn't realize they should be fictional, and submitted a real case study which has now been incorrectly corrected.