Exclusive: Alleged research misconduct cost Turkish surgeons tenure

Two orthopedic surgeons in Turkey will not attain tenured professorships following alleged research misconduct that, so far, has also cost them a pair of publications, Retraction Watch has learned. 

Mehmet Faruk Çatma and Serhan Ünlü are among the authors of a paper about hip-replacement surgery that was published in 2016 in International Orthopedics and retracted earlier this year.

The February 16 retraction notice reads:

The Editor in Chief has retracted this article. After publication, concern have [sic] been raised that the authors may not have been in possession of the whole set of data reported in the paper. The journal received a local court verdict stating that the authors were unable to present the whole data set to the court. The authors did not provide an explanation of why they did not submit their dataset to the local court. The Editor, therefore, cannot be certain of the provenance and ownership of the data, and thus, the integrity of the paper’s findings. The authors have not explicitly stated that they agree to this retraction. 

The paper, “Femoral shortening osteotomy in total hip arthroplasty for severe dysplasia: a comparison of two fixation techniques,” has been cited 14 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The journal’s editor-in-chief, Marius Scarlat, and its publisher, Springer Nature, declined to give further details or share the court verdict. Neither Ünlü, Çatma nor the paper’s corresponding author, Alper Öztürk, responded to requests for comment. 

But as the retraction notice suggests, the story has twists.

It began seven years ago when Murat Altay, an orthopedic surgeon in Ankara, came across the now-retracted article in International Orthopedics. He realized the paper was based on work he had presented orally at a conference a couple of years earlier with some of the other authors. But his name had been left out of the publication.

And that wasn’t all. The paper claimed to include data from 76 patients whose surgeries were performed with an incision at the back of the hip, rather than at the side, which was Altay’s approach. “But in reality, there were only 8 patients who met the criteria for this publication,” he told Retraction Watch. 

Altay, now a professor at Keçiören Training and Research Hospital in Ankara, said he had evidence for this number because he obtained a patient list from Stryker, the company that supplied the hip implants used in the surgeries. 

Altay complained about the paper to organizations in Turkey, including the Intercollegiate Board, which conducts examinations for tenured professorships in the country, and the Turkish Society of Orthopaedics and Traumatology. Eventually, he took his case to the Ankara Regional Administrative Court.

The authors of the article were requested to provide their data, but failed to do so, as stated in a notarized translation of a court decision Altay shared with Retraction Watch.

While several parts of the story remain murky, the court appears to have relied on reports from three independent experts that supported Altay’s allegations. According to one of these reports, which was quoted by the court:

Dr. Ünlü’s failure to submit the aforementioned data despite the court decision supports the idea that there are not the number of patients stated in the publication in question, considering the mentioned issues; that the number of patients in the subject publication was reported, that the names in the oral statement were changed and removed, that it was understood that there were serious similarities between the subject publication and the other publication, therefore the subject article was evaluated as ethically flawed…

The “other publication” to which the expert refers is a 2018 paper in the Indian Journal of Orthopaedics, which was corrected that same year. The corrigendum states that:

the authors acknowledge that Mehmet Faruk Çatma and Serhan Ünlü did not co-author or contribute to this article and were erroneously listed as co-authors. The correct authorship is “Murat Altay, İsmail Demirkale, Hakan Şeşen, Mert Karaduman”.

Altay said he expects yet another 2018 publication, this one in the Journal of Orthopaedic Surgery, to be retracted due to “unfair authorship”:

Again, since I have contributed to this publication, I should have my name, but the authors unfairly removed my name from the publication. Likewise, ethical violation was proved by the court decision. My correspondence with the journal continues.

He also shared with Retraction Watch two letters (in Turkish) in which the Intercollegiate Board updated him on Ünlü and Çatma’s applications for associate professorships. In Ünlü’s case, two Turkish speakers who reviewed the letters told Retraction Watch that his application had been rejected. In Çatma’s case, it is unclear whether his application had been denied, or he had been stripped of an existing associate professorship. 

“The process took a long time and in the end, the publication of two separate articles received ethical violations and the associate professorships of two doctors were withdrawn,” Altay said.

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].