Journals retract 15 Chinese transplantation studies over executed prisoner concerns

The journals Transplantation1 and PLOS One2 have retracted 15 articles reporting studies from China in the past month after the study authors failed to fulfil requests to provide evidence on the source of transplanted kidneys and livers.

Kidney International3 and the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology4 have also both published recent expressions of concern about three kidney transplant studies from China.

In explaining their decisions all four journals referred to an article published in BMJ Open this February, in which a team led by Wendy Rogers of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, reviewed 445 transplantation articles from China published from 2000 to 2017.5

They found that 92% of the studies did not report whether organs had …