Scientific publishing in the COVID-19 era: successes and pitfalls
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EDITORIAL
Scientific publishing in the COVID-19 era: successes and pitfalls Antonio Federico 1
# Fondazione Società Italiana di Neurologia 2020
The interest in neurologic research concerning the COVID pandemic continues to be very high as illustrated by the enormous increase in the number of articles published or present online in the most prestigious scientific journals, from The Lancet, with more than 600 articles since April, to The New England Journal of Medicine, with more than 190, to the neurologic journals such as European Neurology (32), the Journal of Neurolology (20), the Journal of Neurological Sciences (16), and Neurological Sciences (21). When we checked Orphanet, on 20 June 2020, there were more than 23,000 articles related to COVID-19. Table 1 shows the influx of articles to our Journal, Neurological Sciences, in the past 3 months. All of the journals organized an expediated article evaluation, to enable the scientific community to share, as soon as possible, the emerging information regarding mitigating the effects of the pandemic on human health and providing suggestions concerning drug efficacy and the development of new care organizations. The recent retraction of two articles by several authors has put focus on the problem of accuracy regarding big data control and the risks of an accelerated, possibly less accurate, publication system. In fact, two studies of drug therapy and COVID-19 have been retracted from two different prestigious journals regarding the quality of the data obtained from an international database held by Surgisphere Corporation, which included electronic health records from 169 hospitals on three continents and was not controlled by the authors. The Lancet retracted the article titled “Hydroxychloroquine or Chloroquine With or Without a Macrolide for Treatment of COVID-19: A Multinational Registry Analysis” [1].
* Antonio Federico [email protected] 1
Department of Medicine, Surgery and Neurosciences, Medical School, University of Siena, Viale Bracci 2, 53100 Siena, Italy
The New England Journal of Medicine retracted the paper titled “Cardiovascular Disease, Drug Therapy, and Mortality in COVID-19” [2]. The study examined the effect of preexisting treatment with angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors and angiotensin-receptor blockers (ARBs) on COVID-19. In their retraction letter to The Lancet, the authors noted that an independent review of the data was not possible because Surgisphere Corporation, which holds the database, “would not transfer the full dataset, client contracts, and the full ISO audit report to their servers for analysis as such transfer would violate client agreements and confidentiality requirements ... Based on this development, we can no longer vouch for the veracity of the primary data sources.” In their retraction letter to The New England Journal of Medicine, the authors wrote: “Because all the authors were not granted access to the raw data and the raw data could not be made available to a third-party auditor, we are unable to validate
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