As the publishing community debates the merits of naming sleuths in retraction or correction notices, one journal did so without the sleuth’s permission — by publishing an email from the authors naming her as the correction notice.
The sleuth calls it “ethical editorial malpractice.” The publisher says it was an “administrative error.” After Retraction Watch reached out for comment, the journal removed the text of the email from the correction notice.
The paper, on trends in chronic kidney disease in people with lupus, appeared in BMC Nephrology in August.
In November, researcher Fatima Zahra wrote to editors at the journal to point out the authors didn’t adjust the age filter of their dataset to exclude people below 25 years old, as they claimed to do in their methodology. After a few email exchanges Retraction Watch has seen, the editor-in-chief of the journal, Mikhail Sinelnikov, said he would be opening an investigation and contacting the authors. He also confirmed the error in the analysis.
The article has been cited five times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
“However, if following the investigation we conclude that the changes to the manuscript are too great, we will proceed with a retraction,” he wrote. On December 8, Sinelnikov told Zahra an expression of concern would be issued “before the end of the week.”
The expression of concern eventually appeared on January 14. Several weeks later on March 18, the journal published the correction.
The text was an email response to Zahra’s concerns, published in its entirety — including her name. “The author of the article would like to publish the below correction note to his article,” it began. The notice concludes with a signoff from corresponding author Kritick Bhandari on behalf of the authors of the paper. Zahra told us she believed the move constituted “ethical editorial malpractice.”
The authors wrote that the concerns boil down to a “single-word error in the Abstract, Methods and result’s [sic] sections.” They intended for the data to include all patients, including those younger than 25 years old, emphasizing the “error is wording only; the underlying data and analyses are correct.”
The authors also wrote Zahra “declined to follow the standard procedure or to seek clarification from the authors, even though we have been fully open to providing data verification and explanation,” they wrote in the email published as a correction note. “We therefore request that this issue be managed formally through the editorial office and not through repeated informal or external correspondence.”
After we reached out to the journal and Springer Nature for comment, the email text was removed and the notice now reads: “A correction to this article was published erroneously. It has now been removed.” A representative from Springer Nature declined to comment on whether a new correction will be issued to address the original questions.
Katie Ridd, the publishing director for BMC Journals, told us the email was published as a correction due to an “administrative error.”
Both Zahra and the paper’s authors emailed Sinelnikov to address the “correction.”
In an email to Sinelnikov on March 21, Zahra wrote: “The decision to include my name in the notice, particularly in a way that characterizes my actions, is inappropriate and raises concerns regarding reader confidentiality, editorial handling of post-publication correspondence, and adherence to standard publishing ethics.”
Some publishers, like Frontiers, have begun offering sleuths the ability to select for credit, as we’ve written previously. But many sleuths choose to remain anonymous, an option Zahra says she wasn’t given in this case.
The authors emailed Zahra and Sinelnikov the same day, expressing they did not intend the full email to be published. They wrote Zahra’s name was included “solely as part of our explanation” of issues with the paper.
“While we were asked to provide final confirmation of the correction file, we were not aware that the response to queries [sic] document would be published in its existing form,” they wrote.
Sinelnikov told Zahra the correction was a result of “the incorrect actions of a production team member, who mistakenly breached protocol and did not get approval for the publication of the correction text from myself or our research integrity team.”
Bhandari, the corresponding author, did not respond to our request for comment.
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