Journal Article: “Optimizing Peer Review to Minimize the Risk of Retracting Covid-19-Related Literature”

The article linked to below was recently published by Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy.

Title

Optimizing Peer Review to Minimize the Risk of Retracting Covid-19-Related Literature

Authors

Jaime A. Teixeira da Silva
Helmar Bornemann-Cimenti
Panagiotis Tsigaris

Source

Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy (2020)

DOI: 10.1007/s11019-020-09990-z

Abstract

Retractions of COVID-19 literature in both preprints and the peer-reviewed literature serve as a reminder that there are still challenging issues underlying the integrity of the biomedical literature. The risks to academia become larger when such retractions take place in high-ranking biomedical journals. In some cases, retractions result from unreliable or nonexistent data, an issue that could easily be avoided by having open data policies, but there have also been retractions due to oversight in peer review and editorial verification. As COVID-19 continues to affect academics and societies around the world, failures in peer review might also constitute a public health risk. The effectiveness by which COVID-19 literature is corrected, including through retractions, depends on the stringency of measures in place to detect errors and to correct erroneous literature. It also relies on the stringent implementation of open data policies.

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