E. Peterson /Science
By Kelly Cervic
Science‘O COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center and the Heizing-Simmons Foundation.
Three months after the withdrawal of the high-profile COVID-19 paper, the editors Lancet The hope is to reassure the research community that they have learned their lesson. The journal Hydroxychloroquine – an antimalarial drug whose proposed use as a COVD-19 treatment has been the subject of a study on the risks of scientific and political controversy, while its authors were unable to prove the existence of patient data in June. Yesterday, he announced policies, aiming to keep defective studies using “large, real-word datasets” by immediately re-sliding effective, past peer reviews. It includes strict standards for the expertise of peer reviewers of such papers and requirements that all authors guarantee in detail about the validity of their data and their data sharing plans.
“We aim to learn how we can reduce risk and improve processes whenever possible,” the editors wrote in an editorial on epidemiological stress over peer review.
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The now-defunct study, published in May, was based on data from Chicago-based small company Surgisphere, which sought to collect and analyze patient records from hundreds of hospitals around the world. But the paper’s central claim – that antimalarial drugs increase the risk of death in COVID-19 patients – led observers to question the size of the large sample of the study and details about the patient’s demographics and dosage. Lancet The paper withdrew when the surgeon refused to make the underlying data available for an independent audit date. On the same day, New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) Withdrew another study using Surgisphere data, which found that certain bloodpressure medications did not increase the risk of death from COVID-19.
LancetThe review process reveals new standards for plugging certain holes that give results to the surgeon. The paper was published despite the fact that Sapan Desai, the founder of Surgisphere, had accessed only one of the four primary data ces. (His co-authors, Mandeep Mehra, a cardiologist at Harvard University, and Frank Ruchitska, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, University Hospital Spital Zurich, and Amit Patel, an associate faculty member at UT University, announced in June that they would “no longer guarantee”). The accuracy of the data apparently fell apart after the plan for an independent audit date.) Lancet Authors will now need to verify that more than one of them accessed and verified the data in the study and indicated what the authors did. In collaboration between educational laboratories and commercial companies, an academic writer must certify that he has seen the data.
The journal will also need the authors of all its papers to determine what data they will share, the criteria for accessing and how they will make it available. This order was previously applied only to reports of clinical trials, not to forensic studies such as the Surgery Paper. (NEJM Peer Review did not publish a similar statement about the change in practices but its editor said The New York Times That the journal should use reviewers familiar with large hospital data sets.)
For any study that sets large patient data, Lancet Says it will now ensure that at least one reviewer can “understand its power and limitations and comment on it.” It will bring in experts in both statistics and data science for studies involving “very large datasets”. And it will specifically ask reviewers if they have concerns about the paper’s “research integrity or publication ethics.”
Criticism of the journal is unlikely to be silenced in the wake of the changes.
“This is not enough,” says Swedish-based human-computer interaction and scientific visual researcher Lonnie Bessen. Tweeted in response to the announcement. He wrote that the journal needed to make sure that the data under its study could be examined – at least by an independent third party, he wrote.
Larger future studies no longer show any benefit to hydroxychloroquine, but they do not mimic the discovery of an increased risk of death reported in retreat. The Lancet Paper. Withdrawals on correction and publication of surgical sphere results in the journal’s efforts do not involve spreading misinformation. Cited in a September 16 report by the French National Authority for Health The Lancet The paper, because it revoked its recommendation for emergency use of hydroxychloroquine, without noticing that the paper is defamatory.
