Retraction notice to “Will the extraction of COVID-19 from wastewater help flatten the curve?” [Chemosphere 271 (2021) 129429]

This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (https://www.elsevier.com/about/our-business/policies/article-withdrawal).

This article has been retracted at the request of the Editors-in-Chief.

The article is a duplicate of a paper that had been submitted to Science of the Total Environment (STOTEN) on the same day that it was submitted to Chemosphere, 6^th October 2020. The manuscript was peer reviewed by both journals, with STOTEN first registering a ‘revise’ decision, followed by Chemosphere a few weeks later. Both journals invited the authors to submit a revised version, and the corresponding author did this. The revised version submitted to STOTEN was rejected; the one submitted to Chemosphere was accepted. Redundant publications overweigh the relative importance of published findings and distort the academic record of the authors. One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication is therefore that authors declare explicitly that the paper has not been previously published and is not under consideration for publication elsewhere. As such this article represents a misuse of the scientific publishing system.

Furthermore, it was noted that despite each journal selecting different people to review the manuscript, significant sections contained in the reports of the reviewers of the manuscript submitted to STOTEN reappeared in the later reports received from the reviewers of the manuscript submitted to Chemosphere. All reviewers of the manuscript submitted to Chemosphere recommended ‘minor revision’ and delivered their reports on the same day. Additionally, sections of exactly the same text appears in two of the Chemosphere reviewer reports purportedly written by two different reviewers. This suggests a manipulation of the peer-review process and as such represents a clear violation of the fundamentals of peer review, our publishing policies, and publishing ethics standards.

The corresponding author disputes the findings presented above. Paul Oberholster and Anthony Turton were neither aware of nor involved in the submission of this article as described above and should not be considered as co-authors of this article.