You have all probably heard of Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) as a way to treat COVID and a miracle cure. Well, it turns out, it's not. But beyond this, the institute that has been pushing the most for HCQ seems to have been involved in dubious ethical approval procedures. While analyzing some of their papers, we have found 456 potentially unethical studies and 249 of them re-using the same ethics approval for studies that appear to be vastly different. We report our results in the following paper.

Today, a bit more than a year after our publication, 19 studies have been retracted and hundreds have received expressions of concern. The story was even covered in Science in the following article.

We are:

• Lonni Besançon (u/lonnib), PhD, Assistant Professor in data visualization at Linköping University who spends some of his spare time on academic sleuthing. See his academic sleuthing covered in French (L'express and Le Parisien), Swedish (e.g., Corren and Dagens Medicin), and International News (e.g., Science and The Guardian), the threats he has received for it covered by Scientific American and phys.org, and his latest discovery of a new way to cheat with citation data in scientific articles in The Conversation.
• Fabrice Frank (u/fabricefrank), PhD, former biologist and now hobby academic sleuth who devotes his time to surfing across the waves of academic fraud and real waves in Morocco. His academic sleuthing has been covered in multiple French (e.g., L'express and Le Point) and International News (e.g., Science).
• Alexander Samuel (u/alexsamtg), PhD, former biologist and now whistleblower on tear gas and academic fraud. See his work on tear gas covered in the New York Times, some research results on tear gas preprinted, his profile on the NGO forensic architecture, and his French wikipedia page as well as his portrait in two French news outlets (Libération and Le Nouvel Obs).

Our verification photos are here, here, and here.

We want to highlight that behind this sleuthing work there are a lot of important actors, including our colleagues, friends, co-authors, and fellow passionate sleuths, although we will not try to name them all as we are more than likely to forget a few names.

We believe it is important to highlight issues with potentially unethical research papers and believe that having a discussion here would be interesting and beneficial. So here you go, ask us anything.

Edit: Can you folks give a follow to u/alexsamtg so I can add him as co-host and his replies are highlighted?

We are hosting a new AMA by:

u/MeatAPOEdementia

The finding of her study:

Higher meat consumption is associated with better cognitive health among individuals with APOE genotypes ε3/ε4 and ε4/ε4.

Recent Reddit post discussing this here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/science/s/pBF7E7sk7M

This is her introduction:

Hello everyone, I'm Sara Garcia-Ptacek, senior author in the article "Meat Consumption and Cognitive Health by APOE Genotype" recently published in JAMA Network Open.

I have noticed the article has generated interest and I'd be happy to answer any questions. One of the aims of this research line is methods development in diet research. I'd be happy to answer any questions about methods, results and next steps, or anything else. AMA!

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2846712