Quality Management in Scientific Publishing – the Importance to Critically Scrutinize Scientific Work

On September 10, 2013, an article with the title ‘Unbalanced Baseline in School-Based Interventions to Prevent Obesity: Adjustment Can Lead to Bias?’ by the authors R. Sichieri and D. B. Cunha was submitted to our journal OBESITY FACTS . The reviewers of the original submission recommended that major revision was required before the publication could be accepted, specifically a stronger defense of the criticism of baseline adjustment and pooled analysis confirming or rejecting the authors’ hypothesis were recommended. On November 8, 2013, the authors submitted a revised version which, after reconsideration by the original reviewers, was then accepted for publication. The paper was published online on June 28, 2014 and is part of issue 4, 2014 of OBESITY FACTS [1] . At the end of September 2014, a Letter to the Editor ‘The Assertion that Controlling for Baseline (Pre-Randomization) Covariates in Randomized Controlled Trials Leads to Bias is False.’ by P. Li et al. commenting on this article was submitted to OBESITY FACTS and accepted for publication in the present issue [2] . The authors expressed fundamental and severe criticism with regard to the above mentioned article that culminated in the conclusion that the article should be retracted. The authors of the criticized article were asked to respond to the criticism and to meet the request that their article should be retracted. The answer of Sichieri and Cunha to Li et al. and their reasons for refusing to retract their article are also published in this issue [3] . As the criticism expressed in the Letter to the Editor is so severe, an independent statistician was asked to review the original article and the subsequent correspondence. The statistician agreed with the criticism raised by Li et al. [2] and concluded that the critical comments were not adequately addressed in the Authors’ Response [3] . Specifically, Sichieri and Cunha [1] incorrectly assume that the same issues regarding adjustment for baseline values in observational studies apply to cluster randomized trials. They state in their Author’s Response that ‘there are no references related to experimental designs because ... by design we expect Received: March 9, 2015 Accepted: March 20, 2015 Published online: March 31, 2015