Elsevier ob-gyn journal retracted paper after legal threat

When we broke the story last week about a juicy retraction notice in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology (AJOG) – known by its readers as “the Gray Journal” — we wrote that there was more to it than we suspected. That’s an understatement.

As we reported, the AJOG retracted an article that it had published earlier this year because 1) the author, Laurence Cole, had failed to disclose a potential financial conflict of interest with a pregnancy test maker named Church & Dwight; and 2) the article lacked a “credible scientific reason given for conducting the study,” along with other flaws detailed in the notice. (As we wrote the other day, we wonder why those issues did not arise during the initial review of the manuscript — but more on that shortly.)

We’ve since learned that the journal’s move came after it received a sharply worded letter from a high-powered San Francisco lawyer demanding immediate retraction of the article on the grounds that it represented a “substantial” threat to the financial health of his client. That client? A maker of home pregnancy tests who is now in the process of suing the very firm that provided Cole with research funding he failed to disclose.

First, here’s what Cole,  the hormone expert at the University of New Mexico whose paper the journal retracted, said about why he didn’t disclose that funding:

Ob-gyn journal pulls pregnancy test paper for undeclared conflict of interest, other problems

The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology (AJOG) as a remarkable retraction notice in its November issue — the likes of which we haven’t seen before.

A little background: Earlier this year, Laurence Cole, an academic obstetrics specialist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, published a paper in the AJOG looking at the wide variability in the hormone human chorionic gonadotropin, or hCG, during pregnancy (we’d link to the article, but the journal has pulled it, so here’s the abstract on Medline).

Cole runs — or did run until recently, more on that in a moment — the USA hCG Reference Service at the university, which purports to be the only lab in the world that can measure all forms of hCG. He has published extensively in this area of research, with at least 125 papers to his name on the subject, according to a Medline search. One of his websites puts the figure at 246.

So Cole was definitely a known quantity to the journal editors when he submitted his manuscript and when it was published online in February of this year. That’ll be more important in a bit. But first, the retraction notice: