On March 7, a Sage journal published an expression of concern for an article "Determinants of COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis" on cases of myocarditis in people who had received a COVID-19 vaccine. "The Editor and the publisher were alerted to potential issues with the research methodology and conclusions and author conflicts of interest" and had undertaken an investigation of the article, the notice stated. According to one of the authors, the investigation involved two new peer reviews of the paper.
According to a blog post from Jessica Rose, one of the authors of the paper, the two individuals who reviewed the published paper requested dozens of corrections. That appears to contrast with the two original reviewers, who "provided a single sentence review with no substance", a Sage spokesperson told us. In her blog post, Rose said she and her coauthors had revised the paper "as per the reviewers’ helpful comments and suggestions" before it was published.
If the article had so many problems, they should have been addressed in the original peer review process, not a year after publication, Rose wrote. Other researchers have accused Sage of conducting post-publication peer reviews with a foregone conclusion: retracting their work.
