Researchers searched for “COVID-19” on Retraction Watch database (RWD) and PubMed for retracted papers and obtained 18 different articles from two separate searches on May 3 and June 8. About 137 unique COVID-19 related papers are published onto PubMed every day and 0.074% of them are retracted. They concluded that competition and limited time may both contribute to such high rates of retraction and that it is important to further study those factors in impacting the frequent retraction of COVID-19 papers. 

An alarming retraction rate for scientific publications on Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)

- Researchers studied tweets related to the retraction of 3 COVID-19 publications to see if the tweets indicated any form of warning through a qualitative approach to answer the research questions: Do Twitter users mention problems with papers (early) that are later retracted? Are Twitter users who mention retracted publications informed about the paper status? Do they explicitly mention the issues why the publication has been retracted? 

Chosen retracted publications
- Bae, S., Kim, M. C., Kim, J. Y., Cha, H. H., Lim, J. S., Jung, J., ... & Kim, S. H. (2020). Effectiveness of surgical and cotton masks in blocking SARS–CoV-2: a controlled comparison in 4 patients. Annals of internal medicine, 173(1), W22-W23. 
- Mehra, M. R., Desai, S. S., Ruschitzka, F., & Patel, A. N. (2020). RETRACTED: Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19: a multinational registry analysis.
- Wang, X., Xu, W., Hu, G., Xia, S., Sun, Z., Liu, Z., ... & Lu, L. (2020). SARS-CoV-2 infects T lymphocytes through its spike protein-mediated membrane fusion. Cellular and Molecular Immunology, 1. 

Can tweets be used to detect problems early with scientific papers? A case study of three retracted COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2 papers

- "An alarming retraction rate for scientific publications on Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)"
- "Can tweets be used to detect problems early with scientific papers? A case study of three retracted COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2 papers"

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

University of California, Berkeley

To date, a list of papers on COVID-19 have been retracted and withdrawn for spreading misinformation regarding the coronavirus or for containing obviously flawed data collection and results. Scientists and researchers alike now question the lack of quality in these retracted papers and study how different factors have contributed to the unusually high rates of retraction on COVID-19-related papers. 

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