At the risk of breaking the Fourth Wall, here’s a story about peer reviews that weren’t — and shouldn’t have been.

Since mid-February, four different Elsevier journals have invited me to review papers about COVID-19. Now, it is true that we will occasionally review — often with our researcher, Alison Abritis — papers on retractions and closely related issues. And at the risk of creating more work for ourselves, we often wonder who exactly reviewed some of the papers we see published, given how badly they mangle retraction data.

These manuscripts, however, had nothing whatsoever to do with retractions. In case you need evidence, here it is:

• “COVID-19 during pregnancy: Challenges, management and mitigation strategies,” submitted to the Journal of Infection and Public Health
• “ZnO-based surface photocatalyst disinfectant of COVID-19: A sustainable, efficient and economic technique in higher-risk areas and crowded-spaces,” submitted to Environmental Challenges
• “COVID-19: socio-economic impacts and challenges in the working group,” submitted to Heliyon
• “Nonlinear Combinational Dynamic Transmission Rate Model and Its Application in Global COVID-19 Epidemic Prediction and Analysis,” submitted to Results in Physics

Read the rest of this discussion piece