Oh yeah, that's creditable. A nameless paper done written by someone nobody knows in no journal whatsoever, and from what I read, is composed mainly of straw man arguments and a focus on head-on collisions, which given the forces and speeds involved, are more than likely going to be fatal regardless of safety measures and for that matter, are not the most common kind of impact by far.

It is true that seatbelts can be dangerous. If you're trapped under water, or you've rolled, or the car is on fire and you're injured and can't free yourself, then a seatbelt becomes a liability. But by overwhelming numbers, the most common kind of accident is what I encountered: a fender bender, or being hit on the side of the vehicle. In that case, if you have nothing binding you to your seat, then instead of the bruises and damage from the seatbelt which you can recover from with time, your very fragile skull and rather fragile chest area is going to meet the windshield and dash respectively.

Moreover, there's such an overwhelming number of factors in every accident that you can't pin overall safety or danger on any one thing. Try reading this article for an explanation of that: [link]