Sorry to keep banging on about this - but I’ve just found another piece of Holford’s writing where he describes his BMJ Rapid Response as a “reply in the BMJ“. This really could be misleading.
Hell, I’d love to have a reply article in the BMJ to put on my CV. However, Rapid Responses are quite different from articles: the BMJ puts nearly everything that’s submitted onto their website, and does not subject Rapid Responses to peer review etc.
Interestingly, the Sunday Times journalist Brian Deer warned the BMJ in 2005 (in a Rapid Reponse) that “countless BMJ rapid responses…have been routinely lifted wholesale and republished across the web as apparent content from a medical journal“. Whether or not Holford is trying to mislead his readers, it would be easy for readers to misinterpret his references to a BMJ ‘letter’ and ‘reply’ as claims that the BMJ published his response to Goldacre as a letter or as a full article. The BMJ did not do this.
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Patrick Holford Is Not the Only Nutritionist to Confuse Eletters for Published Letters « Holford Watch: Patrick Holford, nutritionism and bad science // July 24, 2007 at 1:47 pm
[...] 24th, 2007 · No Comments Patrick Holford makes several grand references to his reply in the British Medical Journal (BMJ). When he does so, he fails to communicate that pretty much anyone (and that would include Dr [...]
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