I just finished reading another poorly-composed position paper from a major society regarding COVID19 with recommendations based on a handful of sometimes questionable papers and have a few thoughts. 1)
The pandemic has put a terrible strain on everyone. It's been very, very difficult and very frightening. What some institutions went through will leave them scarred for years to come. All of this has left people hungry for high quality science informing treatment decisions. 2)
The desire for rapid data is understandable. But there's a dark side that many of us have observed: authors have rushed papers to publication that on any non-pandemic day would have been desk rejects, but in the current environment have been published in major/top journals. 3)
This issue was brought into light when journals at the pinnacle of research each retracted manuscripts that had global impact on how patients are cared for. The problem here is not the 2 papers pulled by the @NEJM or @TheLancet. 4)
The bigger impact on the medical world, are the large number of papers that have been published with shaky methods and questionable data that WON'T be retracted. These papers are the foundation for consensus docs, guideline statements, and/or affect how patients are treated. 5)
As someone that works at 2 journals, I feel a heightened sense of responsibility regarding this issue, but ultimately the onus is on everyone in the life cycle of research: institutions, IRBs, investigators, reviewers, journals, Societies, and those who read these papers. 6)
My fear is that bad papers + rush to publish = long term harm to our patient care. #Medtwitter, let us affirm our commitment to the research standards that were present before the pandemic and be methodical in how we evaluate new data. Our patients deserve it from us. fin
