After retractions of two Covid-19 papers, scientists ask what went wrong

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With last week’s retractions of two Covid-19 papers from a pair of the world’s top medical journals, the scientific community is once again wrestling with the question that arises any time a high-profile publication blows up: Could this have been prevented?

Entire forests have been felled so scholars can write papers on “the flawed process” of peer review, in which journal editors ask (usually three) outside experts to read a manuscript for rigor, methodological soundness, consistency, and overall quality. Peer review is rife with gender bias. Reviewers try to block competitors’ papers. They steal ideas. They favor authors from prestigious institutions. The process is hardly better than chance at keeping bad studies from being published. It does little to improve papers.

But unlike famous past episodes of research that turned out to be based on fraudulent data — such as two bombshell studies on embryonic stem cells in 2004 and 2005, a practice-changing paper on preventing bone fractures, or hundreds of studies chronicled by Retraction Watch — the latest round of discussion comes at a time when journals are experimenting with different forms of peer review in a bid to improve the process and stop flawed papers from slipping through to publication.

The Lancet and NEJM papers — concluding, respectively, that the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine is associated with higher mortality in Covid-19 patients and that certain hypertension drugs are safe for those patients — were based on data from a supposedly enormous but little-known database of electronic medical records. They were shot through with anomalies, including data from many cases from Africa, where EMRs are rare

“Why didn’t anyone ask, where are the original data?” asked Elisabeth Bik, a science consultant who has sleuthed out numerous cases of faked images in published papers. (The retraction notices from NEJM and Lancet said one co-author, an executive at the database company Surgisphere, refused to let the others see the data even after questions were raised about authenticity). “Why didn’t anyone ask, why are there only four co-authors on a paper with 96,000 patients?” Bik said. It is standard practice to list, as authors, physicians who treated patients whose data were included.

Read full article here.

Sharon Begley – STAT – June 8, 2020.

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