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Kellermann's data

By tlambert on June 1, 2001.

Since Kellermann had released his data when that paragraph
was written, the part I left out was irrelevant.

David Friedman writes:

From your point of view, what is the story about his data? The story I
thought I had seen was that he refused to release it until forced to do
so--my vague memory was that the research was government funded and that
eventually made it possible to compel him to release the data. Is that
true? If not, what really happened?

The accounts that claim that Kellermann had to be forced to release
his data come from such obviously biased sources that I'm not inclined
to give them much credence. I don't know the reason, but my guess is
that he didn't release the data straight away because he wanted to get
another publication using the data. This was published in Archives of
Internal Medicine. 157(7):777-782, 1997 Apr 14. He then released the
data in May 1997.

For obvious reasons, I'm inclined to
regard with suspicion someone who publishes results but doesn't want to
make the data public on which the results are supposed to be based.

The data was made public over four years ago. If there was some
problem with his analysis of the data, surely someone would have found
it by now.

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