An oncology journal has retracted a review article on the hypothetical link between Covid-19 and cancer after determining that the medical writer who authored the work hadn’t done all the writing herself.
The paper, “Clinical sequelae of the novel coronavirus: does COVID-19 infection predispose patients to cancer?” appeared in Future Oncology in May and was written by Priya Hays, who at the time was a technical writer with Talis Biomedical Corp., in Menlo Park, Calif. Hays is currently with Abbott, according to her LinkedIn profile. She also has a company called Hays Documentation Specialists, which offers a variety of manuscript services, including academic writing and something called “unstructured authoring assistance.”
As the retraction notice indicates, Hays appears to have had some authoring assistance of her own:
The Review by Priya Hays, ‘Clinical sequelae of the novel coronavirus: does COVID-19 infection predispose patients to cancer?’, which appeared in the July 2020 issue of Future Oncology 16(20), 1463–1474 (2020), has been found to contain significant portions of plagiarized text from other published literature. In light of this, Future Oncology has retracted the article.
The authors and editors of Future Oncology would like to sincerely apologize for any inconvenience or confusion this may have caused our readers.
Hays has not responded to a request for comment.
The retraction brings our list of retracted COVID-19 papers to 41.
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Thanks for good information.
The content of the published article are relevant especially for the period which we are passing through.
This was a very reckless move by the author but thanks for the information