ideasIdea
Automatic flagging of retracted or corrected evidence in guidelines and decision support
When a study is retracted or corrected, every guideline and software tool that relied on it would be alerted automatically, so wrong evidence stops influencing care.
Retracted papers continue to be cited for years; guidelines and decision tools rarely re-check their evidence base. With structured citations in computable guidelines and an evidence graph, retraction and correction notices (Retraction Watch database, Crossref) can be matched to every recommendation that depends on the affected study, triggering review. The proposal builds and funds that matching service.
Hypothesis
Automatic propagation will reduce the time from retraction to guideline review from years to weeks and will identify recommendations resting on retracted evidence that are currently unnoticed.
Rationale
Retraction Watch and Crossref make notices machine-readable; the gap is that guidelines do not maintain machine-readable citation lists, which computable guidelines would fix.
What would test it
Match the Retraction Watch database against citations in three major oncology guidelines; count affected recommendations; run the service prospectively for one year.
Maturity
speculative
Who has to act
engineering
Cost to try
Small (under $1M)
Years to first evidence
1
Bottlenecks it attacks
- Knowledge reaches practice too slowly · Knowledge diffusion is slow: it takes years for a proven result to change what most patients receive, and no one can keep up with the literature.
- Preclinical results do not reproduce · Fewer than half of landmark cancer biology findings reproduce when someone else tries.