This awesome Pubpeer thread is about 80 times better than the original paper

This came up already, but in the meantime this paper in the Journal of Surgical Research has been just raked over the coals, over and over and over again, in this delightful Pubpeer thread. 31 comments so far, all of them just slamming the original published paper and many with interesting insights of their own.

The original article should never have been published, but the Pubpeer thread is pretty good, really it has all the stuff that the Journal of Surgical Research should’ve published in the first place.

The authors of the original article do not seem to have yet responded on the thread; I assume that’s because they suspect that any defense of their paper would be throughly rebutted.

Statistics is hard, and it’s understandable that these authors would be confused by the notion of power, but it is irresponsible for them to have written this new paper given that various people have already pointed out their error in print. Commenter #13 in the above-linked Pubpeer thread says the publication of this new paper is a failure of peer review. But it is also a failure on the part of the authors. When people make a mistake multiple times after it has been pointed out to the, it’s ultimately their fault. At some point, ignorance is no excuse.