The Lancet Alters Editorial Practices After Surgisphere Scandal

The changes, which affect the declarations authors have to sign and the peer-review process, have received a mixed response from the scientific community.

Written byCatherine Offord
| 4 min read

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The Lancet has announced changes to its editorial policies following the controversial publication and retraction earlier this year of a paper on COVID-19 patients treated with the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine. The changes, described in an comment entitled “Learning from a retraction” last Thursday (September 17), include alterations to peer review and other paper acceptance procedures, and have prompted mixed responses from the scientific and science publishing community.

“The proposed changes are a welcome addition, and I am glad to see Lancet implementing them,” Mario Malički, co–editor-in-chief of the journal Research Integrity and Peer Review, writes in an email to The Scientist. “However, they do not answer the questions at the core of the peer review process. How is it that the Lancet’s editorial team and reviewers (including a statistical reviewer) missed what the research community saw when the paper came out, [and] how do the new ...

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Meet the Author

  • After undergraduate research with spiders at the University of Oxford and graduate research with ants at Princeton University, Catherine left arthropods and academia to become a science journalist. She has worked in various guises at The Scientist since 2016. As Senior Editor, she wrote articles for the online and print publications, and edited the magazine’s Notebook, Careers, and Bio Business sections. She reports on subjects ranging from cellular and molecular biology to research misconduct and science policy. Find more of her work at her website.

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