Title:
COVID-19 data scandal prompts tweaks to elite journal’s review process
Author:
Kelly Servick
Published:
Science, 18 September 2020
From the article:
Three months after retracting a high-profile COVID-19 paper, editors at The Lancet hope to assure the research community that they’ve learned their lesson. The journal yanked a study on risks of hydroxychloroquine—an antimalarial drug whose proposed use as a COVID-19 treatment has stirred scientific and political controversy—in June when its authors couldn’t prove the underlying patient data even existed. Yesterday, it announced policies, effective immediately, that aim to keep flawed studies using “large, real-word datasets” from slipping past peer review again. They include stricter standards for the expertise of peer reviewers of such papers and requirements that all authors vouch for the validity of their data and detail their data-sharing plans.