Retraction of unreliable publication

The Annals has taken the unusual and serious step of retraction of a paper published in May 2013 ¹ because serious doubt has been cast on the reliability of the report. After publication we were informed by the Hospital Director of a hospital in Dubai named as the research site that the first author had worked there for a short time but that his employment ceased before the stated end of recruitment to the study. The paper had five authors, all based in Italy, yet the Methods section described patient recruitment only in the City Hospital, Dubai.

The hospital pointed out several discrepancies between the report that we published and their records. These included that:

• the author performed only 27 haemorrhoid operations at the hospital, yet the paper deals with a sample of 143 patients;

• the paper states that approval was granted by the Ethics Committee before research began but the records show that no approval was granted by the Ethics Committee or by the hospital management to conduct any study at the hospital;

• the report described telephone follow-up interviews with patients in 2012 although it was not standard practice to perform telephone follow-ups 40 months after operating. Furthermore, the authors did not have access to patient records from the City Hospital in 2012.

The Annals asked the authors to comment on all of these points. It transpired that approval from an Ethics Committee in Italy was obtained only after recruitment had ended. The authors have failed to provide a convincing description of how recruitment, randomisation and data collection continued after the departure of the first author and how the follow-up data were collected.

In view of the continued uncertainty about the origin and reliability of the data in this report we have withdrawn it and we have informed the relevant regulatory authorities