ArticleBMJ open2019
Compliance with ethical standards in the reporting of donor sources and ethics review in peer-reviewed publications involving organ transplantation in China: a scoping review.
Article in BMJ open, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 33 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
33 citing papers in PubMed.
- Perceptions of Research Integrity Among Medical Researchers in Shanghai Teaching Hospitals: A Cross-Sectional Survey.Developing world bioethics · 2026Article
- EXPRESSION OF CONCERN: Clinical Observation and Nursing Care on the Prevention of Abdominal Organ Cluster Transplantation Rejection.Journal of clinical nursing · 2026Article
- EXPRESSION OF CONCERN: Donor Liver Steatosis: A Risk Factor for Early New-Onset Diabetes after Liver Transplantation.Journal of diabetes investigation · 2026Article
- EXPRESSION OF CONCERN: Association of Polymorphisms in Interleukin-18 and Interleukin-28B With Hepatitis B Recurrence After Liver Transplantation in Chinese Han Population.International journal of immunogenetics · 2026Article
- EXPRESSION OF CONCERN: Tacrolimus-Related Seizure After Pediatric Liver Transplantation - A Single-Center Experience.Pediatric transplantation · 2026Article
- Retraction: ABO-incompatible liver transplantation for severe hepatitis B patients.Transplant international : official journal of the European Society for Organ Transplantation · 2026Article
- Editorial - The Secret Life of Retractions in Scientific Publications.Principles and practice of clinical research (2015) · 2023Article
- Trinity review: integrating Registered Reports with research ethics and funding reviews.BMC research notes · 2022Article
- Retraction Note: In-hospital cerebrovascular complications following orthotopic liver transplantation: A retrospective study.BMC neurology · 2021Article
- Ethics of publication, between forgery, retraction and protecting freedom: an ENJOY score for authors and editors.Journal of nephrology · 2019Article
- Confucianism and organ donation: moral duties from xiao (filial piety) to ren (humaneness).Medicine, health care, and philosophy · 2019Article
- A 10-year follow up of publishing ethics in China: what is new and what is unchanged.Research integrity and peer review · 2019Article
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- Retraction: Pathological Roles of Interleukin-22 in the Development of Recurrent Hepatitis C after Liver Transplantation.PloS one · 2019Article
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Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectivesThe objective of this study is to investigate whether papers reporting research on Chinese transplant recipients comply with international professional standards aimed at excluding publication of research that: (1) involves any biological material from executed prisoners; (2) lacks Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval and (3) lacks consent of donors.
designScoping review based on Arksey and O'Mallee's methodological framework. DATA SOURCES: Medline, Scopus and Embase were searched from January 2000 to April 2017. ELIGIBILITY CRITERIA: We included research papers published in peer-reviewed English-language journals reporting on outcomes of research involving recipients of transplanted hearts, livers or lungs in mainland China. DATA EXTRACTION AND SYNTHESIS: Data were extracted by individual authors working independently following training and benchmarking. Descriptive statistics were compiled using Excel.
results445 included studies reported on outcomes of 85 477 transplants. 412 (92.5%) failed to report whether or not organs were sourced from executed prisoners; and 439 (99%) failed to report that organ sources gave consent for transplantation. In contrast, 324 (73%) reported approval from an IRB. Of the papers claiming that no prisoners' organs were involved in the transplants, 19 of them involved 2688 transplants that took place prior to 2010, when there was no volunteer donor programme in China. DISCUSSION: The transplant research community has failed to implement ethical standards banning publication of research using material from executed prisoners. As a result, a large body of unethical research now exists, raising issues of complicity and moral hazard to the extent that the transplant community uses and benefits from the results of this research. We call for retraction of this literature pending investigation of individual papers.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.