Many scientists citing two scandalous COVID-19 papers ignore their retractions

 June 2020, in the biggest research scandal of the pandemic so far, two of the most important medical journals each retracted a high-profile study of COVID-19 patients. Thousands of news articles, tweets, and scholarly commentaries highlighted the scandal, yet many researchers apparently failed to notice. In an examination of the most recent 200 academic articles published in 2020 that cite those papers, Science found that more than half—including many in leading journals—used the disgraced papers to support scientific findings and failed to note the retractions.

COVID-19 "is such a hot topic that publishers are willing to publish without proper vetting," even in the face of retractions that made global headlines, says Elizabeth Suelzer, a reference librarian at the Medical College of Wisconsin who has written about problematic citations to a retracted 1998 study in The Lancet falsely linking vaccination to autism.



Both of the retracted COVID-19 papers, one in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and the other in The Lancet, were based on what appeared to be a huge database of patient records compiled from hospitals worldwide by Surgisphere, a small company operated by vascular surgeon Sapan Desai, who was a co-author on each article.

The 22 May 2020 Lancet paper ostensibly showed that hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug promoted by President Donald Trump and others, could harm rather than help COVID-19 patients. Its publication led to a temporary halt in a major clinical trial and inflamed an already-divisive debate over the drug, which has proved to be no help against COVID-19. The 1 May NEJM article corroborated other evidence that people already taking certain blood pressure medicines did not face a greater risk of death if they developed COVID-19.

Questions soon arose about the validity, and even existence, of the Surgisphere database, however, and the retractions followed on 4 June. But of the 200 papers examined by Science—all published after the retractions—105 inappropriately cited one of the disgraced studies. In several cases it was a primary source for a meta-analysis combining multiple studies to draw overarching conclusions. In most, the studies were cited as scientific support or context. Science also found a handful of articles that uncritically cited an influential April preprint based on the same Surgisphere data set, which described the antiparasitic drug ivermectin as beneficial in critical COVID-19 cases. (There is no standard way to retract preprints, however.)

Ivan Oransky, co-founder of the website Retraction Watch, says such blunders occur because "people are either willfully or negligently not checking references." Many authors copy and paste lists of apparently relevant citations from similar papers without actually reading them, he says. "It's frightening. It's terrible, but common."


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