| Antibody tests | Unreliability | Lack of gold standard | General |
| Retroviruses. in Viral infections of humans |
| Blattner, W. A. |
| | "One difficulty in assessing the specificity and sensitivity of retrovirus assays is the absence of a final 'gold standard'. In the absence of gold standards for both HTLV-I and HIV-1, the true sensitivity and specificity for the detection of viral antibodies remain imprecise". |
| | Plenum Medical Book Company: New York, 1989, 3rd Edition, ed Evans, A.S. pp. 545-592. | 1989 |
| AIDS in Africa: distinguishing fact and fiction |
| Papadopulos-Eleopulos E, Turner Valendar F, Papadimitriou John M, Bialy Harvey |
| | "For some unknown reason, HIV experts [such as Mulder and Burke] determine the specificity of the HIV antibody tests by repeating an antibody test or a combination of antibody tests an arbitrary number of times and use another antibody test as a gold standard... an outcome which could eventuate by making the same mistake twice...Although Mortimer et al. as well as Gallo and his colleagues used clinical and/or epidemiological features to determine the specificity of the HIV antibody tests, this in scientifically invalid." |
| | World Journal of Microbiology & Biotechnology (1995) 11, 135-143 | 1995 |
| Screening for HIV: can we afford the false positive rate?. |
| Meyer KB, Pauker SG. |
| | “The meaning of positive tests will depend on the joint [ELISA/WB] false positive rate. Because we lack a gold standard, we do not know what that rate is now. We cannot know what it will be in a large-scale screening program” |
| | NEJM. 1987;317(4):238-41. | 1987 |