‘One would not want to tarnish another journal’: Why a republished COVID-19 masks study doesn’t say it was retracted

When a retracted paper is republished in a new journal, should it note the retraction?

A few readers have asked us that question as they forwarded a paper published in May in Environmental Research, an Elsevier title. The study, “Carbon dioxide rises beyond acceptable safety levels in children under nose and mouth covering: Results of an experimental measurement study in healthy children,” bore striking similarities to a paper by the same authors that was retracted from JAMA Pediatrics in July 2021. 

That retraction was the second for the paper’s first author, Harald Walach, who also lost an affiliation with a university in Poland. Walach tells us that he let the editor know about the JAMA Pediatrics retraction before he submitted the manuscript:

I think the retraction was politically motivated and did not find any true fault in the paper. I have, of course, notified the editor, before submitting it that it had been retracted and explained in my pre-inquiry why I think that the retraction was void and flawed. Following this the editor invited me to submit the paper in the full version and then submitted it to a new review sending it out to three indepenedent experts, who, of course, knew about its history and found it valid. I changed various details and added some clarifications during the publication process, which is, why the final published paper is considerably longer and contains some more details that had neither been contained in the long version that was published as a preprint nor in the supplemental material, for instance the back to the envelope calculations that show that our measures are well in agreement with those calculated from expected versions, as is done with capnography.

This shows: our paper was valid all along, the retraction was flawed and pointless, and the publication which is available now is a valid rendering of our findings.

When we asked Jose L. Domingo, one of the editors in chief of Environmental Research, whether the authors had told the journal that the paper had been retracted, he originally said no, and that had the editors known, they probably wouldn’t have sent it out for peer review. 

But when he checked with an associate editor, he said he’d been mistaken. Domingo told us that the authors had said, in their message accompanying the submission:

The paper was originally published by JAMA Pediatrics as a Research Letter. Due to the short format and the fact that a lot of people had not accessed the supplemental methodological information critique was voiced and obviously pressure put on the journal such that the paper was withdrawn, in our view without good reason and without fair hearing. The final “scientific review” the journal said it had received was never sent to us, despite our asking twice.

The authors also wrote:

Please be aware that the current shape of the paper reflects multiple cycles of improvements already, and the core question is whether experts deem our measurements valid. Naturally we think they are. Everything else, the framing, the political consequences, is negotiable, not our data. We would prefer a swift desk-rejection, if you do not believe that the paper is publishable in your journal.

It turns out that the paper had been submitted to Toxicology Reports, another Elsevier journal, before being submitted to Environmental Research. But after what Walach called “an unfair review process, a fact that even the second reviewer commented on as inappropriate,” the paper was rejected. Walach said:

Although none of the reviews that came back said that the paper was flawed the editors rejected it nevertheless. I assume that it had to do with another paper that was obviously published in that journal and critically discussed at a time, when our paper was submitted and in review.

Walach would not say which paper that was, but Retraction Watch readers may recall that Toxicology Reports subjected an entire issue on COVID-19 to an expression of concern in December, and later retracted several papers.

We asked Walach whether he thought the republished version should have noted the retraction.

Well, this is a matter of editorial policy. If the paper is deemed valid, as it obviously was following the review process, a note that it is a formerly retracted paper that was published by JAMA Ped would only cast a bad light on the journal it was retracted from. Having edited a journal for Karger for more than 20 years I know from my own experience that publishers would normally refrain from such information as one would not want to tarnish another journal.

On the other hand, reviewers who want to be sure that they do not look at the same study twice would probably welcome such an information, but they will be clever enough to spot the fact that it is the same study that had been retracted previously. So I don’t see the benefit of it and it would be down to the publisher.

Walach also republished his other retracted paper – which claimed that there were two deaths for every three prevented by COVID-19 vaccinations – last year. That paper does not mention the earlier retraction either, except obliquely in a footnote to a blog post that discussed it.

Walach and the editor of the journal made the reviews and revisions available to us, and we have made them available here. The journal, Science, Public Health Policy & the Law, is published by the Institute of Pure and Applied Knowledge, which as we have noted is “a group that has been critical of vaccines and of the response to COVID-19 and has funded one study that was retracted earlier this year.”

Domingo asked us whether editors had a way to check whether manuscripts were new versions of previously retracted papers. Why yes, we told him: Check the Retraction Watch Database, which major publishers and several reference management software programs do.

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