In early 2020, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused a pandemic, affecting the entire globe. Initially, the disease was relatively unknown. However, as COVID-19 became more widespread, our knowledge regarding the virus and its resultant disease increased. The healthcare system and policymakers in different countries relied on articles published on the subject, from epidemiological features to useful drugs and at-risk populations, for their decisions. Thousands of research articles have since been published on COVID-19 and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Researchers were and are keen to publish their COVID-19-related research as quickly as possible in this hot race to publication. In this atmosphere, the accuracy and quality of published articles might cause some concerns. Although pre-publication peer-review systems are undeniably robust and traditionally employed in scientific publications, post-publication review is flourishing during this pandemic era. Researchers and scholars have critically scrutinized the COVID19-related scientific output of medical journals, leading to several corrections and retractions. Moreover, some authors later noticed some inconsistencies in their published work, which forced them to withdraw their articles. Through this letter, the authors aimed to show an evaluation of the retracted COVID-19 articles. The database of retraction watch was searched on June 18, 2020, using “COVID-19”, “coronavirus disease 2019”, “coronavirus 2019”, “SARS-COV-2”, and “2019-nCov” as keywords. Additionally, the special webpage in retraction watch was analyzed for retracted or withdrawn articles (Marcus 2020). The search retrieved a total of 26 articles from the retraction watch database. Of these articles, two were temporarily retracted (Cai et al. 2020; Yin 2020), two received an expression of concern (Gautret et al. 2020; Wang et al. 2020a, b), and two have been currently corrected (Sriwijitalai and Wiwanitkit 2020; Tang et al. 2020). One was a withdrawn preprint as it was submitted to the preprint server without the full consent of all the authors. This preprint is now published in the Cell Host and Microbes journal (Chen et al. 2020). Moreover, a reliable access was not obtained to one

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撤回的 COVID-19 文章：激烈的发表竞争的副作用

2020 年初，2019 年冠状病毒病 (COVID-19) 引发大流行，影响了全球。最初，这种疾病相对不为人所知。然而，随着 COVID-19 的传播越来越广泛，我们对该病毒及其引起的疾病的了解也随之增加。不同国家的医疗保健系统和政策制定者依赖于发表的有关该主题的文章来做出决定，从流行病学特征到有用的药物和高危人群。此后，已经发表了数千篇关于 COVID-19 和严重急性呼吸综合征冠状病毒 2 (SARS-CoV-2) 的研究文章。研究人员过去和现在都热衷于在这场激烈的发表竞赛中尽快发表他们与 COVID-19 相关的研究成果。在这种氛围下，发表文章的准确性和质量可能会引起一些担忧。尽管发表前同行评审系统无疑是强大的，并且传统上在科学出版物中采用，但发表后评审在这个大流行时期却蓬勃发展。研究人员和学者对医学期刊中与新冠病毒相关的科学成果进行了严格审查，导致多次更正和撤回。此外，一些作者后来注意到他们发表的作品中存在一些不一致之处，这迫使他们撤回了自己的文章。通过这封信，作者旨在展示对撤回的 COVID-19 文章的评估。撤回观察数据库于2020年6月18日以“COVID-19”、“2019冠状病毒病”、“2019冠状病毒”、“SARS-COV-2”、“2019-nCov”为关键词进行检索。此外，还对撤回观察中的特殊网页进行了撤回或撤回文章的分析（Marcus 2020）。检索从撤回观察数据库中总共检索到 26 篇文章。这些文章中，有两篇被暂时撤回（Cai et al. 2020；Yin 2020），两篇收到关注表达（Gautret et al. 2020；Wang et al. 2020a, b），还有两篇目前已得到纠正（Sriwijitalai 和Wiwanitkit 2020；Tang 等人 2020）。其中一份是撤回的预印本，因为它在未经所有作者完全同意的情况下提交给预印本服务器。该预印本现已发表在《细胞宿主和微生物》杂志上（Chen 等人，2020 年）。此外，无法获得可靠的访问权限