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LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Questions asked through two examples of dilemmas of publication ethics in the process of COVID‑19 Ozgur Tanriverdi1,2,3   · Muesser Ozcan3,4 Received: 18 July 2020 / Accepted: 14 August 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic is a kind of global disaster caused by the new coronavirus-19, the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Since the first eruption of this pandemic, which adversely affected the world in many ways, a large number of publications have been presented to the world of science. In this article, possible publication ethical dilemmas related to scientific articles increasing in number during the COVID-19 pandemic were tried to be reminded through two examples of articles. Keywords  COVID-19 pandemic · SARS-Cov-2 · Publishing ethics · Scientific articles

To the Editor Between January 2020 and June 2020, it was determined that in the “PubMed” search engine, where international scientific researches were intensely indexed, the total number of publications corresponding to the keyword “COVID-19” and “COVID-19 treatment” was 385. All the journals about a nightmare pandemic seemed to have entered the race to quickly include scientific publications. It is obvious that researches related to this virus-related molecular pathogenesis, prevention and treatment of disease, which affect the whole world economically, socially, psychologically, and academically, are very important for all humanity. However, the fact that many journals gave priority to the studies related to the pandemic may have caused a scientific pollution with the decision of publishing very * Ozgur Tanriverdi [email protected] 1



Department of Medical Oncology, Faculty of Medicine, Mugla Sitki Kocman University, Mugla Universitesi Egitim Ve Arastirma Hastanesi, Onkoloji Poliklinigi, 48000 Mugla, Turkey

2



Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Mugla Sitki Kocman University, Mugla, Turkey

3

Department of Elderly Health, Faculty of Health Science, Mugla Sitki Kocman University, Mugla, Turkey

4

Deparment of Medicine History and Ethics, Faculty of Medicine, Mugla Sitki Kocman University, Mugla, Turkey



quickly. It was also possible that there were points that were overlooked in terms of both the reliability of the data and the filtering of violations in terms of ethics. Indeed, the subsequent withdrawal of two separate studies published in the form of a large patient series for COVID-19 treatment reminded us of the value of these ethical dilemmas. Two scientific publications that had to be withdrawn by their authors were published in two valuable, respected and ethically sensitive journals in medicine, Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine [1, 2]. The first article was published in the May 2020 issue of the Lancet Journal titled “Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID19: a multinational registry analysis” [1]. In this study of chloroquine and hydr