511 Medical Journal Article Retractions After "Coordinated Peer Review Rings" Are Discovered.

We have to stop outsourcing our thinking. Here’s at least one reason why from Principia-Scientific:

One of the world’s largest open-access journal publishers is retracting more than 500 papers, based on the discovery of unethical actions…

The papers have all been published since August 2020.

Sixteen journals published the papers that are being retracted…

Richard Bennett, vice president of researcher and publishing services for Hindawi, told the Retraction Watch blog that the review uncovered “coordinated peer review rings,” which featured reviewers and editors coordinating to get papers through peer review.

Dervishe the grey @dervyshe

"After months of investigation that identified networks of reviewers and editors manipulating the peer review process, Hindawi plans to retract 511 papers across 16 journals, Retraction Watch has learned."

lifesitenews.comFollow the science? Scientific journal publisher to retract hundreds of ‘manipulated’ peer-reviewed papers - LifeSiteCorrecting the situation will not be easy, but a first step would be to institute criminal penalties for research and review fraud.

I’m curious to learn what was in those 500+ papers, and what the scientific community now believes as a result. I’ve observed that science does a lousy job of “setting the record straight” unless it props up the approved narrative.

Nice Wise has been digging deeper to discover some other disturbing trends.

The Hindawi journal Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing is booming. Until a few years ago they published 100-200 papers a year, however they published 269 papers in 2019, 368 in 2020 and 1,212 in 2021. So far in 2022 they have published 2,429…

Nick Wise @nickwizzo

Irrelevant content! Non-matching email addresses! Citation farming! All in one special issue in a Hindawi journal?! I've blogged about it here, kindly hosted by @deevybee :

deevybee.blogspot.comWhat is going on in Hindawi special issues?A guest blogpost by Nick Wise http://www.eng.cam.ac.uk/profiles/nhw24 The Hindawi journal Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing ...

Lack of oversight anywhere can have significant repercussions. Mistakes can happen. Opportunism can happen. Corruption can happen. And we’re all vulnerable when we fail to acknowledge what’s happening with gatekeepers at every level.

We’re busy. We’re overwhelmed. The science is cumbersome and confusing to read, but if we don’t engage in our own critical thinking process, they’ve got us by the headline (which is supported by the citation from the potentially lame, nonsensical paper that no one really read.)

They count us us NOT reading the whole story. I suspect sometimes THEY don’t even read the whole paper (or in the case of legislators, the whole bill).

My Own Little Experiment

I did some of my own personal experiments in my college and post-graduate studies. I remember being assigned one particularly rote and tedious paper that felt like a regurgitation exercise… and felt convinced that my professor would never bother to read it. So after the first page, I peppered the paper with the lyrics of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and ultimately turned in something I considered incomplete regardless.

I got an A.

And that wasn’t someone paid to look the other way or involved in some kind of lucrative scheme. It was likely just human nature in response to having to read stacks of long, boring papers.

What’s happening now in $cience weaponizes that aspect of human nature. Remember Surgisphere?

Mr. Popper P. @MrPopperP1

Surgisphere and the Lancet fraud. Remember? No? Get informed. #Fauci #HCQ #Lancet

How many people still believe those original assertions about HCQ?

PhillyPharmaBoy @PhillyPharmaBoy

@28April62 @NIHDirector @scrippsresearch We are no observing the contrary. The studies I cited show this. Surgisphere faked the HCQ data to market their fake database (see below). Remember, there was a positive ivermectin manuscript from them that was removed from a preprint site.

the-scientist.comThe Surgisphere Scandal: What Went Wrong?The high-profile retractions of two COVID-19 studies stunned the scientific community earlier this year and prompted calls for reviews of how science is conducted, published, and acted upon. The warning signs had been there all along.

Some highlights from The Scientist article from 2020:

It sounds absurd that an obscure US company with a hastily constructed website could have driven international health policy and brought major clinical trials to a halt within the span of a few weeks. Yet that’s what happened earlier this year, when Illinois-based Surgisphere Corporation began a publishing spree that would trigger one of the largest scientific scandals of the COVID-19 pandemic to date.

At the heart of the deception was a paper published in The Lancet on May 22 that suggested hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug promoted by US President Donald Trump and others as a therapy for COVID-19, was associated with an increased risk of death in patients hospitalized with the disease…

The study was a medical and political bombshell. News outlets analyzed the implications for what they referred to as the “drug touted by Trump.” Within days, public health bodies including the World Health Organization (WHO) and the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) instructed organizers of clinical trials of hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 treatment or prophylaxis to suspend recruitment, while the French government reversed an earlier decree allowing the drug to be prescribed to patients hospitalized with the virus…

…It also emerged that, for a company claiming to have created one of the world’s largest and most sophisticated patient databases, Surgisphere had little in the way of medical research to show for it. Founded by vascular surgeon Sapan Desai in 2008 and employing only a handful of people at a time, the company initially produced textbooks aimed at medical students. It later dabbled in various projects, including a short-lived medical journal, before shooting to fame this year with its high-profile publications on health outcomes in COVID-19 patients. 

…Desai’s astonishing influence on COVID-19 policy was dependent on multiple parties, Cooper notes, from the institutions that employed him to the coauthors on his research studies, the journals that published the work, and the organizations that issued public health decisions based on his research. Seen that way, the scandal represents “a perfect storm of issues that have always been there,” she says. 

An investigation by The Scientist points to a series of missed opportunities to halt Surgisphere’s progress—in some cases stemming from people’s failure to check implausible claims made by Desai or from a pattern of ignoring warnings of problematic data or behavior. While a few parties have since accepted some responsibility and outlined plans to avoid similar situations in the future, the majority have not. 

Increasingly, the people who are writing the Cliff’s Notes version of our reality are not to be trusted. We need to boost our immunity to $cience-based messaging and start rooting back into our gut instincts.