A retraction in an obscure journal. An equally obscure retraction notice. An Israeli company with no web presence. Conflicts of interest involving authors and editors.
That’s what we’ve uncovered so far after noticing the other day that the American Journal of the Medical Sciences (AJMS) had retracted a May 2010 article by a group of Israeli heart doctors led by Arthur Shiyovich, of Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon.
The paper described promising results in a study of a new test for diagnosing coronary artery disease at the bedside by measuring aspects of a patient’s pulse at the fingertip.
As AJMS editor David Ploth told us, the approach had seemed “kind of innovative” to him, so he’d accepted the manuscript: “It seemed like it might have some applicability.”
Ploth was therefore surprised sometime later to receive a letter from the authors requesting that the journal retract their paper. According to the journal: Continue reading Tangled leads: Cardiac study retraction reveals a company’s stopped trials, and lots of questions