CathInfo.com

A high-profile scientist who spearheaded a campaign on medical research has admitted to fabricating research published in two international journals.

A number of papers written by Dr Anna Ahimastos have been withdrawn from the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and a journal published by the American Heart Association.

Dr Ahimastos was working for Melbourne's prestigious Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute at the time.

She has admitted to making up some of the data in the study, and has resigned.

The paper looked at whether Ramipril or Prilace, a well-known blood pressure drug, could help people with peripheral artery disease to walk pain free.

The study had found that after almost six months on the drug, patients could walk without pain for maximum periods of time on a treadmill.

Two journals, JAMA and Circulation Research, both said the paper was retracted after an internal analysis by Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute "revealed anomalies that triggered an investigation which resulted in an admission of fabricated results by Dr Ahimastos".

Actions compromised study: Baker

Dr Bronwyn Kingwell, from the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute, said the organisation took action as soon as the fabrication came to light.

"Dr Ahimastos admitted to fabricating records for some patients," she said.

Specifically, Dr Ahimastos made up data about trial participants that did not exist.

"These actions compromised the overall findings of the study and so we moved quickly to correct the public record by retracting the relevant papers," Dr Kingwell said.

"The institute does take these matters very seriously and every effort has been made to correct the record and contact all affected parties as quickly as possible."

She said the main results from the retracted JAMA study had since been corroborated in a small clinical trial.

Dr Ahimastos is a member of the Australian Society for Medical Research and is involved in science communication.

She was also named a Tall Poppy — an Australian Institute of Policy and Science campaign which recognises scientific excellence — in Victoria in 2010.

According to Research Gate, Dr Ahimastos is listed as an author on 23 publications and the paper in question has been cited 35 times.

Dr Ahimastos did not respond to the ABC's inquiries.
Authors apologise, vow to strengthen audit procedures

A statement published in the two journals said Dr Ahimastos was solely responsible for data collection and integrity of the study.

"According to the institute's findings, no co-authors were involved in this misrepresentation," it stated.

"In addition, no data from the Townsville and Brisbane recruitment centres were included in this publication and data from those centres remains valid."

The authors of the paper have apologised and the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute has vowed to strengthen its governance and audit procedures to minimise the chance of it happening again.

'Publish-or-perish' research culture

Dr Virginia Barbour, the chair of the Committee on Publication Ethics, said while corrections were fairly common in academic journals, a full retraction of a paper was more rare.

"If you talk to academics nowadays, there is a real publish-or-perish culture," she said.

"A study in the UK last year found ... researchers explicitly said the pressure to publish led them to cut corners, which is a pretty alarming finding.

"We do feel one of the problems is that authors are pressured to publish, and publish in very high journals."

She said there were cases of substantial misconduct where grants had to be handed back.

US scientists are significantly more likely to publish fake research than scientists from elsewhere, finds a trawl of officially withdrawn (retracted) studies, published online in the Journal of Medical Ethics.

Fraudsters are also more likely to be "repeat offenders," the study shows.

The study author searched the PubMed database for every scientific research paper that had been withdrawn -- and therefore officially expunged from the public record -- between 2000 and 2010.

A total of 788 papers had been retracted during this period. Around three quarters of these papers had been withdrawn because of a serious error (545); the rest of the retractions were attributed to fraud (data fabrication or falsification).

The highest number of retracted papers were written by US first authors (260), accounting for a third of the total. One in three of these was attributed to fraud.

The UK, India, Japan, and China each had more than 40 papers withdrawn during the decade. Asian nations, including South Korea, accounted for 30% of retractions. Of these, one in four was attributed to fraud.

The fakes were more likely to appear in leading publications with a high "impact factor." This is a measure of how often research is cited in other peer reviewed journals.

More than half (53%) of the faked research papers had been written by a first author who was a "repeat offender." This was the case in only one in five (18%) of the erroneous papers.

The average number of authors on all retracted papers was three, but some had 10 or more. Faked research papers were significantly more likely to have multiple authors.

Each first author who was a repeat fraudster had an average of six co-authors, each of whom had had another three retractions.

"The duplicity of some authors is cause for concern," comments the author. Retraction is the strongest sanction that can be applied to published research, but currently, "[it] is a very blunt instrument used for offences both gravely serious and trivial."

Abstract

Background Papers retracted for fraud (data fabrication or data falsification) may represent a deliberate effort to deceive, a motivation fundamentally different from papers retracted for error. It is hypothesised that fraudulent authors target journals with a high impact factor (IF), have other fraudulent publications, diffuse responsibility across many co-authors, delay retracting fraudulent papers and publish from countries with a weak research infrastructure.

Methods All 788 English language research papers retracted from the PubMed database between 2000 and 2010 were evaluated. Data pertinent to each retracted paper were abstracted from the paper and the reasons for retraction were derived from the retraction notice and dichotomised as fraud or error. Data for each retracted article were entered in an Excel spreadsheet for analysis.

Results Journal IF was higher for fraudulent papers (p<0.001). Roughly 53% of fraudulent papers were written by a first author who had written other retracted papers (‘repeat offender’), whereas only 18% of erroneous papers were written by a repeat offender (&#967;=88.40; p<0.0001). Fraudulent papers had more authors (p<0.001) and were retracted more slowly than erroneous papers (p<0.005). Surprisingly, there was significantly more fraud than error among retracted papers from the USA (&#967;2=8.71; p<0.05) compared with the rest of the world.

Conclusions This study reports evidence consistent with the ‘deliberate fraud’ hypothesis. The results suggest that papers retracted because of data fabrication or falsification represent a calculated effort to deceive. It is inferred that such behaviour is neither naïve, feckless nor inadvertent.

Yeah, people lie, even scientists.  So what?!  Point is that the scientific method guarantees that the truth will come out, eventually.

Scientists recently discovered that people will believe anything if scientists say they discovered it. :wink: