A journal has retracted a pair of studies on Covid-19 in prisoners after the authors’ institution found that they had not obtained adequate ethics approval for the research.
The two studies appeared in the Journal of Primary Care & Community Health, a Sage publication. The authors, from Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in Lubbock, were led by Kenneth Nugent, an internal medicine specialist at the institution.
The first study, published in August 2020, was titled “A Retrospective Analysis and Comparison of Prisoners and Community-Based Patients with COVID-19 Requiring Intensive Care During the First Phase of the Pandemic in West Texas.”
The second, from November 2020, was titled “Basic Demographic Parameters Help Predict Outcomes in Patients Hospitalized With COVID-19 During the First Wave of Infection in West Texas.” Only the first article has been cited (one time), according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
According to the retraction notice:
At the request of the Journal Editor(s) and the Publisher, the following articles has [sic] been retracted.
Ali K, Rao S, Berdine G, Test V, Nugent K. A Retrospective Analysis and Comparison of Prisoners and Community-Based Patients with COVID-19 Requiring Intensive Care During the First Phase of the Pandemic in West Texas. Journal of Primary Care & Community Health. January 2020. doi:10.1177/2150132720954687
Ali K, Rao S, Dennis J, Berdine G, Test V, Nugent K. Basic Demographic Parameters Help Predict Outcomes in Patients Hospitalized With COVID-19 During the First Wave of Infection in West Texas. Journal of Primary Care & Community Health. January 2020. doi:10.1177/2150132720970717
The retraction of these two articles follows a request by the authors after their institutional review board found that the previously approved study protocols appear to violate IRB guidelines around prisoner research. The Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center does not feel the mistake was made in bad faith but recognize [sic] the severity of the violation merits retraction.
Neither Nugent nor the editor-in-chief of the journal immediately responded to our requests for comment. The two removals bump the number of retracted Covid-19 papers to 146, by our count.
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