Retracted COVID-19 articles: a side-effect of the hot race to publication

Abstract

early 2020, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused a pandemic, affecting the entire globe. Initially, the disease was relatively unknown. However, as COVID-19 became more widespread, our knowledge regarding the virus and its resultant disease increased. The healthcare system and policymakers in different countries relied on articles published on the subject, from epidemiological features to useful drugs and at-risk populations, for their decisions. Thousands of research articles have since been published on COVID-19 and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Researchers were and are keen to publish their COVID-19-related research as quickly as possible in this hot race to publication. In this atmosphere, the accuracy and quality of published articles might cause some concerns. Although pre-publication peer-review systems are undeniably robust and traditionally employed in scientific publications, post-publication review is flourishing during this pandemic era. Researchers and scholars have critically scrutinized the COVID- 19-related scientific output of medical journals, leading to several corrections and retrac- tions. Moreover, some authors later noticed some inconsistencies in their published work, which forced them to withdraw their articles. Through this letter, the authors aimed to show an evaluation of the retracted COVID-19 articles. The database of retraction watch was searched on June 18, 2020, using “COVID-19”, “coronavirus disease 2019”, “coronavirus 2019”, “SARS-COV-2”, and “2019-nCov” as keywords. Additionally, the special webpage in retraction watch was analyzed for retracted or withdrawn articles (Marcus 2020). The search retrieved a total of 26 articles from the retraction watch database. Of these articles, two were temporarily retracted (Cai et al. 2020; Yin 2020), two received an expression of concern (Gautret et al. 2020; Wang et al. 2020a, b), and two have been currently corrected (Sriwijitalai and Wiwanitkit 2020; Tang et al. 2020). One was a withdrawn preprint as it was submitted to the preprint server with- out the full consent of all the authors. This preprint is now published in the Cell Host and Microbes journal (Chen et al. 2020)