{
  "abstract": "Xu and colleagues quantify the impact of retracted clinical trials on systematic reviews and clinical practice guidelines.1 They found that removing retracted trials altered statistical significance in 16% of meta-analyses and reversed effect direction in 8.4%, with evidence from these distorted systematic reviews cited in 157 clinical practice guidelines. These findings show how flawed data propagate through a “contamination chain” in the biomedical evidence ecosystem. They also highlight a critical gap: the need to tackle contamination beyond formally retracted studies, as retractions are only the tip of a much larger iceberg threatening evidence integrity.",
  "authors": [
    {
      "affiliations": [
        "Hadassah Medical School, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Israel, Ein Karem, Jerusalem, Israel"
      ],
      "name": "Zeev Shoham"
    },
    {
      "affiliations": [
        "Centre for Reproductive Medicine, Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Peking University Third Hospital, Haidian District, Beijing, China"
      ],
      "name": "Rong Li"
    },
    {
      "affiliations": [
        "Department of Clinical and Experimental Medicine, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy"
      ],
      "name": "Tommaso Simoncini"
    },
    {
      "affiliations": [
        "Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil"
      ],
      "name": "Maria do Carmo Borges de Souza"
    },
    {
      "affiliations": [
        "Hacettepe University, School of Medicine, Ankara, Turkey"
      ],
      "name": "Gurkan Bozdag"
    },
    {
      "affiliations": [
        "Maternity C Ward and Recurrent Pregnancy Loss Preventive Clinic, Soroka University Medical Center, Faculty of Health Sciences, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel"
      ],
      "name": "Asher Bashiri"
    }
  ],
  "title": "Beyond retractions: tackling the contamination chain of flawed evidence",
  "uid": "c12c7d02-3290-5b62-b414-5d6141cd4941"
}