On March 1, 2022, Eric Ross, then a psychiatrist-in-training in Boston, alerted two major publishers to a pair of disturbingly similar papers he suspected had been “fabricated.”
“The articles are written by the same corresponding author and contain much of the same unrealistic data,” Ross, now an assistant professor at the University of Vermont, in Burlington, wrote in an email whose recipients included the editors-in-chief of Wiley’s CNS Neuroscience & Therapeutics and Springer Nature’s Neurotherapeutics.
Ross listed several “red flags” he felt clearly pointed to “research misconduct” in the two papers, which reported on two separate clinical trials of new antidepressant add-on medications (metformin and cilostazol). He also emphasized that fake medical research could have real consequences:
Continue reading Give or take a year or two: Case reveals publishers’ vastly different retraction times
