Recently, after adequate quality control, several studies on COVID-19 or SARS-CoV-2 published in prestigious scientific journals have been withdrawn. Are there methods to prevent these situations?
The results of some studies may determine the therapeutic choices. Therapeutic choices determine the positive or negative evolution of a pathology. What researchers do is important and honesty must be demanded. To prevent the dissemination of altered results, the publication of the data set can be requested
I support the answer of Matteo Nioi
with best regards
Falah Hasan Obayes Al-Khikani I really appreciate your opinion. The question now is the following: are there other methods beyond the request of the data sets?
Despite many instances of research fraud there is no way of effectively validating data. Even data sets can be fabricated...
Rajkumar Rajendram Thanks a lot! I agree with you. However, scientific journals could make greater efforts (especially in these cases): e.g., request data sets (to check the statistical analysis), request copies of various certifications (validation of the companies involved, the approvals of the ethic committee, the various informed consents) etc..
The publication of scientific papers is based on various levels of control. The first level is the reading of the covering letter by the editor. The editor evaluates the interest of what you say and gives a look at the abstract, If you are convincing, send the work to the referees. It is not easy to find available referees. In the end, it is the scientific expertise of the referees that suggests what to do to the editor. Obviously, the great speed required by the Journals to do the review, because you pay a lot (on average a week) and the real competence of the referee are important aspects. Once the work is published, it will probably be useful for your career, but the real scientific value will be demonstrated by the number of references of other authors who consider your work a useful stone in the construction of an increasingly precise and reliable scientific model of an aspect of human knowledge. Unfortunately, it takes time to have an answer that makes you understand that what you have done is scientifically valid.
Having said that, in the case of Covid19, the great use that is made of repository archives without a peer-review being made first, mixes ideas very much with non-experts. They are data, honest or dishonest they are, which you can evaluate only if you have the specific necessary skills.There are no other methods.
greetings
Giovanni Colonna Mokhaled N. A. Al-Hamadani Thank you for your participation in the discussion. Are we sure that the number of citations referring to an article is a valid indicator of the value of scientific research? For example, if we analyze the following articles:
PMID 32450107 (Lancet)
PMID 32356626 (NEJM)
these manuscripts have been cited a large number of times before being withdrawn! This means that it would be desirable to prevent these situations! Moreover, some patients have not received therapy for COVID-19 based on some of these articles! The popularity of a scientific journal can favor the citations of its articles but it is not an absolute guarantee of the value of scientific research!
In my opinion, the publication system should be improved.
Dear Pietro Emanuele Napoli , I agree with you totally. Nowadays, some health systems depend on published articles regarding COVID-19. If the journals are accepting them, they should make sure and double-check the data and information that has been provided.
For this reason, I do agree that the publication system should be improved!
Honestly produced results in scientific work can have a rapid or strong or even weak impact, but they all refine and expand the foundations of human knowledge. This assumes that the methodologies used and the results produced are consistent and significant. A Science Magazine is a periodical publication that is not a scientific journal but with news, opinions and reports about science, generally written for a non-expert audience. While periodical publications, including primary research and/or reviews, written by scientific experts is called a "Scientific Journal". Several estimates about Scientific Journals point to around 30,000, with close to two million articles published each year. But there is another category of pseudo-scientific journals, the so-called Predatory Journals. Publishing in these journals costs very little, they do not carry out peer-reviews, they are difficult to eradicate from the context of the Scientific Journals. Estimates about these journals point to around 10,000. They are used by dishonest researchers who want to make a career. You pay and publish what you want. These journals are among us, they are 30%, difficult to highlight despite the continuous lists because they are very skilled and changeable to adapt. They are real economic enterprises, with names similar to those of famous Journals and offices in cities such as London, New York, Zurich, etc .. They heavily pollute human knowledge with all the consequences you can imagine.
But there is another problem. Scientific data often go through contiguous disciplines until they are used by researchers from scientific areas far removed from the original ones. So far so good, it's the spread of science. The problem arises when hypotheses or criticisms expressed in articles or reviews, therefore without an experimental basis, are collected and arrive in distant disciplines where may be considered as experimental results. When a researcher looks for evidence that endorses his results, he uses any useful information. Therefore, unproven hypotheses become knowledge. About 30% of the hypotheses are transformed into results. The real problems are these, do not argue about the IF. At least the IF, valid or contested that it is, is owned exclusively by the scientific journals, as well as the peer-review. We must defend these methods, even if they can be perfected, but not to contest to make them useless. They are the guarantee that we are talking about science, the honest and meaningful one.
About covid. Thousands of articles are archived in temporary repositories awaiting peer-review. The results of these articles, although fascinating, should not be discussed in any way. The ethics of science dictate it. Instead, many discuss them as if they were real scientific knowledge. They have been taken over by newspapers and TV with a devastating impact on the population. Scientific work may contain results endorsed by reviewers but not by the community. It is not the first time, it has already happened in the past, for example, the famous Benveniste's article on the memory of water in Nature. The paper was retracted. The research started in the eighties by Benveniste and the groups led by him and was subsequently taken up by other laboratories, none of which managed to reproduce the results declared by the French scholar. These claims also intrigued the US Department of Defense (for possible military applications), apparently without conclusions, but we will never know the truth.