Top medical journals compromised ethical, fact-checking standards amid pandemic

Coronavirus: Top medical journals compromised ethical, fact-checking standards amid pandemic, Australian study finds: New Australian research has brought into question the ethical and fact-checking standards of the world's most influential medical journals during the coronavirus pandemic.

 

The report, published in the Medical Journal of Australia today, found one in five COVID-19 studies published by the journals during the first five months of the pandemic had corrections issued after publication.

 

This compares to 7.4 per cent — or roughly one in every 13 studies — published at the same time last year. 

 

Changes in medical scientific publication associated with the COVID‐19 pandemic: Rapid dissemination of information should not come at the expense of quality, ethical standards or oversight

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) pandemic has resulted in wide‐ranging health, social and economic impacts. By October 2020, global cases exceeded 41 million, with 1.1 million deaths.1 Urgent requirements for information were met with data on epidemiology, clinical features and recommended management being circulated on social media and pre‐publication servers. While this has allowed timely sharing of data, it has also brought risk of misinformation, with consequent changes to medical practice and misdirection of scarce resources based on flawed evidence.

Medical publishing uses peer review to provide independent and critical assessment to verify data integrity, validity of interpretations, and confidence in conclusions. This process can take many weeks; however, in a rapidly spreading pandemic, speed is a competing priority.

We hypothesised that these considerations may have altered the nature of medical publication. Accordingly, we characterised various aspects of COVID‐19‐related articles published in the five leading general medical journals with the highest impact factors (Web of Science) compared with an equivalent period in the preceding year.