We’ll tell you later, says ophthalmology journal about retracted paper

The European Ophthalmic Review has retracted a 2014 article about the macular degeneration drug aflibercept without any explanation.

Here’s the retraction notice, such as it is:

This article has been retracted. Please check back for further information.

We can’t find any trace of the article or an abstract for it online, but have obtained a copy here. A LinkedIn post by an employee of Touch Medical Media, the journal’s UK-based publisher, also suggests that a satellite symposium by that name, chaired by first author Jean-Francois Korobelnik, was held at the 2014 European Association for Vision and Eye Research (EVER) in Nice.

We reached out to Korobelnik, Reinier Schlingemann (the paper’s second author) and Ian Pearce (third author), but did not receive a reply.

In response to our request for comment, we received the following reply from Nicola Cartridge, managing editor at Touch Medical Media, on June 1:

Many thanks for contacting us, my colleague Carla passed on your email.

We are currently having a technical issue updating the retracted article on the website, but I hope to have this fixed by the end of the day tomorrow (UK time).

I will update you as soon as we have the final information.

Three days later, Cartridge replied to a follow-up poke to say that the fix was on its way:

My apologies for the delay, I was out of the office yesterday. We hope to have the retraction information finalized online today. Apologies again for the delay.

As of today, however, the retraction note has not been updated.

The article has not been cited. European Ophthalmic Review is not indexed by PubMed.

Update 6/9/15 1:18 p.m. eastern: We’ve gotten more details from Cartridge:

Please accept our apologies for taking a while to issue a statement regarding this article retraction.

The retraction was not related to the content of the article in any way, but was a technical requirement following a recent update to the prescribing information for aflibercept. The article carried a version of the prescribing information which was no longer valid, owing to addition of a new licensed indication for aflibercept.

We aim to include this further information along with a copy of the article on our website shortly.

Hat tip: Rolf Degen

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