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High-profile coronavirus retractions raise concerns about data oversight

Retracted studies had relied on health-record analyses from a company that declined to share its raw data for an audit.
  1. Heidi Ledford
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  2. Richard Van Noorden
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Two weeks after a high-profile paper in The Lancet1 reported that the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine might be dangerous to patients with COVID-19, three of its four authors have retracted the work because they were unable to independently verify their data set, a large proprietary collection of electronic health records analysed by Surgisphere, a US company.

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Nature 582, 160 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-01695-w

Additional reporting by Smriti Mallapaty and David Cyranoski

References

  1. Mehra, M. R., Desai, S. S., Ruschitzka, F. & Patel, A. N. Lancet https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)31180-6 (2020).

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  2. Mehra, M. R., Desai, S. S., Kuy S., Henry, T. D. & Patel, A. N. N. Engl. J. Med. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2007621 (2020).

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  3. Boulware, D. R. et al. N. Engl. J. Med. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2016638 (2020).

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