I am from the field of Mathematics. If you find some published articles in a mathematical journal, you can check the validity of the claimed results just by reading the proof or provide a counterexample even if a wrong claim passed the peer review process.
Recently I was reading a spectacular paper in one of the most prestigious medical journals (The Lancet to be exact). This paper collected data from all over the world to study the efficacy of a drug (Hydroxychloroquine and antibiotics) on COVID-19. When reading the study, even as a non expert, I found that the paper contains fake data since -for example- the paper claimed to study a number of positive patients in five hospitals in Australia, but this number turns out to be greater than all the positive patients in all of Australia. The readers asked the authors to provide raw data but the authors failed to do that. The paper was retracted days later.
I am not familiar with the way research is done in the medical sciences. So I just want to know
- How is peer review performed in this field?
- In case the peer reviewers missed something, how can people reading a medical paper see the proof that the study handles real data so we can verify the validity of the numbers claimed in the study?
