IN 2011 BEN MOL, a professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at Monash University, in Melbourne, came across a retraction notice for a study on uterine fibroids and infertility published by a researcher in Egypt. The journal which had published it was retracting it because it contained identical numbers to those in an earlier Spanish study—except that that one had been on uterine polyps. The author, it turned out, had simply copied parts of the polyp paper and changed the disease.
“From that moment I was alert,” says Dr Mol. And his alertness was not merely as a reader of published papers. He was also, at the time, an editor of the European Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, and frequently also a peer reviewer for papers submitted to other journals. Sure enough, two papers containing apparently fabricated data soon landed on his desk. He rejected them. But, a year later, he came across them again, except with the fishy data changed, published in another journal.
Since then, he has teamed up with other researchers to investigate groups of papers by authors he has spotted as data fabricators. Wherever he saw smoke, he found fire. There were tables on patients’ characteristics that contained only even numbers. There were values that were clinically unlikely. There was an implausible 40:60 sex ratio of babies when the mothers-to-be had, purportedly, been selected at random. Eye-popping speeds of completing clinical trials were common.
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