/sci/ - Science & Math

>Dude's article was retracted because of Reddit
https://retractionwatch.com/2023/01/17/reddit-post-prompts-retraction-of-article-that-called-trump-the-main-driver-of-vaccine-misinformation-on-twitter/

In October 2021, a Reddit user on the r/badscience subforum posted a long critique of an article published in PLOS ONE earlier that year that had analyzed the “anti-vaccination infodemic” on Twitter and concluded that former U.S. president Donald Trump was “the main driver of vaccine misinformation” on the platform before his account was suspended.

The critique, titled “Terrible PlosOne Paper Dissected,” listed concerns about the sample size (50 pro-vaccine and 50 anti-vaccine accounts), method of selecting the sample and control groups, and data analysis. The Redditor also looked at the reviews of the article which PLOS ONE made available, and concluded that “clearly neither reviewer actually read it in any detail.”

The day after the comment was posted, an account for PLOS Communications responded, thanking the user “for your post publication peer review” and saying that PLOS ONE was looking into the article.

According to emails seen by Retraction Watch, the PLOS publication ethics team emailed the corresponding author on the article in June 2022 with the subject line “Request for clarification about published PLOS ONE article.”

In December, the article was retracted.