The British Medical Journal (BMJ) Group has retracted seven of eight articles published in a special issue in 2019 in one of its journals.
An investigation into the issue, released by the Journal of Medical Genetics, uncovered “evidence of improbable device use in many articles, and compromised peer review in almost all articles,” the BMJ Group said in a retraction notice on April 14.
The special issue, which covered various aspects of immunotherapy for cancer, featured guest editors who selected reviewers. The majority of guest editors and reviewers ended up being employees of Nanjing University in China.
“The articles were investigated together because there was concern about almost all of the content in the collection,” the notice stated.
A spokesperson for the BMJ group declined to provide more details on what prompted the retractions.
“In cases of retraction, there are often legal restraints, and we don’t want to arm those intent on research misconduct with the tools to evade detection, so I [am] really sorry, but I can’t provide any additional information,” the spokesperson told The Epoch Times via email.
The retracted papers include “Exosomes derived from exhausted CD8+ T cells impaired the anticancer function of normal CD8+ T cells” and “Bacteria-free minicircle DNA system to generate integration-free CAR-T cells.”
Corresponding authors for the retracted papers did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication. The authors are all affiliated with Chinese institutions.
The sole paper that was part of the special issue and not retracted was a case report on using treatments, including high-dose corticosteroids, to manage a case of a disorder called hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis in a patient who was also diagnosed with “aggressive metastatic breast cancer.” The report also went over the sequencing of the genes associated with the case and determined that patients with certain genes may be predisposed to develop haemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis.
There was no evidence that the review process for that report was compromised, according to the retraction notice.
That case report was authored by researchers from Harvard Medical School in the United States.
“This topic collection was really out of scope for the journal, and accepted under a different editorial regime, when different processes applied,“ Dr. Huw Dorkins, editor in chief of the Journal of Medical Genetics, said in a statement. ”We have since reviewed our policies and improved our practice around topic collections.”
Dorkins has decided that because the collection was not in the journal’s scope, the journal will not review the retracted articles for possible republication, according to the journal.
