Thụy Du

Was reading an article from CNN Money earlier about Johnson & Johnson’s drug problem “U.S. takes over three Tylenol plants“. The article was published today, March 10 2011. In the middle of the article, they mentioned a scathing inspection report from the FDA.

Naturally, I wanted to know about what they actually violated and read the actual report, so clicked on the link, which led me to an article published on July 22 2010 “Pepcid factory problems mirror Tylenol mess“. No report. Only another mention of “scathing”.

Again, I clicked. A June 22 2010 article came up “Tylenol plant: from bad to worse“. Still no report to be found, only, yes, you guess it right, “scathing”.

And finally, another click gives me some information, but not the report itself, a May 4 2010 article “Children’s Tylenol recall: FDA slams factory conditions“. This is at best misleading, at worse intentional link baiting for visitors. Wonder if this is their policy… This reminds me of a particular research group, which I will not name, that employed a similar tactic for their scientific publications. On one of their 2007 paper, they used a particular method to make silica nanoparticles, which was of my interest at the time. Unfortunately, they didn’t provide the recipes, but instead cited one of their earlier papers in 2005, which is an ok practice to minimize redundancy. I found that paper, which did not actually include the recipes, but again cited another papers in 2001. Believe or not, this continued for another 5 or 6 times, all the way to their original paper in 1988. What’s worse, our school only has paper subscription to that journal, not electronic one, hence the several feet high stacks of bound journal issues I had to drag around just to find the recipes…  Not quite sure what they were trying to do, but the effect is not good!