Re: When can an article be "withdrawn"?

[Carl Anderson <ca25@drexel.edu>]

Another wrinkle concerning withdrawal of articles:  I used to work at what
was then called Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science, where a
routine function of reference librarians was to help attorneys determine
what was accepted practice at any given point in time.  Apparently a
physician is immune from malpractice liability if he or she followed
accepted practice at some time in the past, even if later discoveries show
that such practice resulted in undesirable consequences.  It's fairly easy
to track recommendations for use in annual drug reference works, for
example, so you can easily see when authoritative opinion changed.  What
if the record of accepted practice is altered by withdrawal or
substitution?


> Apologies for cross-posting:
>
> Readers of this list may be interested in an editorial from the latest
> issue of the Journal of the Medical Library Association, which discusses
> the case last fall in which an article published in Human Immunology
> (journal of the American Society of Histocompatibility and Immunogenetics)
> was removed from Science Direct after publication, at the request of the
> society.  The article is available from PubMed Central in either PDF
>
> http://www.pubmedcentral.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=100760&action=stream&blobt
> ype=pdf
>
> or HTML
>
> http://www.pubmedcentral.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=100760
>
> (Plutchak TS.  Sands Shifting Beneath Our Feet.  J Med Libr Assoc. April
> 2002;90(2):161-3.)
>
> T. Scott Plutchak
> Editor, Journal of the Medical Library Association
> Director, Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences
> University of Alabama at Birmingham
> tscott@uab.edu