Protecting Clinical Decisions at the Source
Every day, clinicians and researchers turn to medical literature to inform care. What most institutions lack is a system to warn them when that literature can't be trusted.
The Hidden Risk in Your Clinical Workflows
Studies that have been retracted, flagged with an expression of concern, or that cite retracted studies, are not consistently labeled in the databases and search engines your clinical staff uses every day. Meanwhile, problematic publishers — entities that publish for profit and do not follow scholarly publishing standards — inject low-quality research into the same trusted databases clinicians rely on. The consequences are well-documented:
- Over 40,000 articles have been retracted since 2020
- More than 500,000 studies currently cite one or more retracted articles; in one analysis of over 9,500 of those studies, the retraction was acknowledged fewer than 5% of the time.
- A retracted 2021 COVID-19 study published in The Lancet has been cited more than 2,250 times
- 9,189 patients were enrolled in clinical trials where treatments were based on retracted research
Flawed evidence doesn't disappear - it gets cited, incorporated into guidelines, and used to inform patient care.
A Real-Time Integrity Layer for Clinical Research
LibKey from Third Iron works silently in the background of any browser, alerting clinical staff in real time when they encounter an article that has been retracted, is under an expression of concern, is published in a problematic journal, or cites retracted research — with no new workflow, no training, and no EHR integration needed.
Built for Informatics Teams
LibKey provides a scalable, system-wide safeguard that supports:
- Patient safety initiatives by reducing exposure to unreliable evidence
- Evidence-based practice by strengthening the quality of cited literature
- Accreditation and compliance efforts through a documentable, institution-wide control
From Access to Trust
LibKey moves your institution from access to information to confidence in the integrity of that information — because in clinical care, those are not the same thing.
Contact Third Iron at [email protected] or visit thirdiron.com