Authors response to article retraction

Dear Editor

Regarding the decision to withdraw the article entitled ‘Benefits of vaginal misoprostol before IUD insertion in women with previous caesarean delivery: a randomized controlled trial, The European Journal of Contraception & Reproductive Health Care, 23:1, 32–37, DOI: 10.1080/13625187.2018.1428297.’

Authors need to clarify some data among authors

The investigation team sought raw data, ethical committee approval, informed consent and the protocol submitted. These files have been checked and no concerns have been raised about them.

The editor decided to withdraw the paper based on the following issues.

1. They are concerned about submitting the article within 1 month of completing the study which can usually be done through professional cooperation between the authors.

2. The editors stated that visual inspection of the numerical baseline variables age, BMI and previous CS showed (a) that the distribution in the treatment group differed significantly from the control group and (b) that the variable values in the treatment group appears to be fabricated in blocks. In response to this comment, the authors statistically assessed the visual analysis of the baseline variable numbers showed no significant differences between both groups or any data fabrication (Picture 1). This is confirmed by the immaterial p-values ​​when comparing these variables, as shown in Table 1 in the retracted published article (Figure 2). On the contrary, the visual analysis of the numerical results shows a significant difference between both groups (Picture 3). This is also confirmed significantly p-values ​​when comparing these variables, as shown in table 2 in our published article (Figure 4).

3. The editor described that the null hypothesis of no autocorrelation was strongly rejected for several variables in the treatment group (age, number of CS, difficulty of entry), as well as the number of CS in the control group and they claimed that the These findings were confirmed by the Wald-Wolfowitz test of randomness. Regarding the test for autocorrelation, it is not suitable for this research model. It is the correlation of a signal with a delayed copy of itself as a function of delay. Sometimes, this is known as serial correlation in the discrete-time case [Citation1]. Therefore, if we repeat this test with the same variables but in a different order, we will get a different result every time we change the order of the variables!!!

4. Finally, when analyzing the data using the Wald–Wolfowitz randomness test, we found no significant differences between both groups for all numerical variables, as shown in Figure 5. The unimportant ones p-Values ​​indicate that both groups were drawn from the same population sample size, i.e., the data arose from a true randomized controlled trial [Citation2].