Study 329 lawsuit collapses

A legal attempt to force a retraction of Study 329 has failed and the journal has gone silent. What happens when science cannot—or will not—correct itself?

For nearly a year, attorney George W. Murgatroyd III tried to compel the retraction of one of the most notorious papers in modern psychiatry.

Now, that effort has come to an end.

A judge dismissed Murgatroyd’s lawsuit against the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry (JAACAP) and publisher Elsevier over Study 329 — a paper that has been at the centre of scientific controversy for more than two decades.