A sleuth who has identified several hundred articles describing clinical women’s health research with untrustworthy data, leading to nearly 300 retractions, has now lost one of his own papers for duplicate publication.
Ben Mol, who leads the Evidence-based Women’s Health Care Research Group in the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Monash University in Australia, has worked to raise awareness of problematic data informing medical recommendations for women’s health care, and to cleanse the literature of unreliable studies, with major media outlets covering his work.
Mol told Retraction Watch about 50 of his papers have been investigated since 2020, usually after anonymous complaints. “It is clear that somebody had been screening my papers … in a systematic way to find any wrongdoing,” he said. His only other retraction came after he and colleagues found an error in their own work and requested the action.
Mol apologized to his collaborators around the world whose work has been questioned “because of having me as a co-author.”
Mol had begun looking for unreliable trials in the literature in 2017, according to a summary of publishers’ responses to his team’s work. We first covered his findings in 2020.
The retracted paper originally appeared in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology in March 2019. The article described a randomized controlled trial at a hospital in Vietnam testing methods of preventing preterm birth for women pregnant with twins. The group, with Mol as the senior author, had presented the results at a meeting in February 2018, and published the same study in the Vietnamese Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology in 2018, in the Vietnamese language. They had also submitted the paper to two other major journals and been rejected, Mol said.
Mol was not aware of the Vietnamese publication, he told us, but takes “full responsibility” for the paper. “My colleagues published the Vietnamese version in ignorance, and, while it is formally not according to the rules, I have no major problem with that,” he said.
Obstetrics & Gynecology published a letter critiquing the paper in August 2019, which raised “several concerns with methodologic issues that compromise the internal and external validity of the study.”
The journal received further “anonymous accusations” in 2021, Mol said, and the authors shared their data with the publication. In an email he posted on PubPeer, a representative from the journal wrote the editors and statistician discussed the concerns “and found no reason to think that the data are fabricated, or that the integrity of the reported study is compromised.”
In May 2023, Ahmed Mohamed Maged posted a long comment on PubPeer about the study. Maged, an ob-gyn at Cairo University in Egypt, has had 10 papers retracted and nine more marked with expressions of concern after Mol and colleagues examined 22 trials Maged published and found “potential data integrity issues” in some of them.
“I do not think any of his comments are substantial,” Mol told us. Maged has left comments on PubPeer about several of Mol’s other papers.
Mol said the journal contacted the authors in June about the earlier publication. The retraction notice appeared in the journal’s October issue, citing “duplicate publication” as the reason for retraction.
“The authors have stated that the duplication was not intentional,” the notice states. It also states the first author had said Mol and another author were not aware of the initial publication, but the journal “is unable to independently verify this assertion.”
The Obstetrics & Gynecology article has been cited 34 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
“Formally the retraction is correct and according to the rules,” Mol told us, although he questioned whether it was “that bad” to have the prior publication in Vietnamese and in a journal not indexed in PubMed. The authors suggested adding a sentence to the retraction notice stating they agreed with the retraction, he said, but the journal did not do so.
In August and September, anonymous users commented on the paper asserting there were “discrepancies” between the two versions. Mol replied, explaining the two papers had used a different clinical cut-off value, and one of the commenters had incorrectly extracted data from the papers for a comparison table.
Mol pointed us to another article in Obstetrics & Gynecology for which Mol and a colleague had identified similarities in the data to a previously published trial by some of the same authors, but Obstetrics & Gynecology editors responded they would not pursue any action.
We reached out to Jason D. Wright, the journal’s editor-in-chief, for comment on the retraction of Mol’s paper or the other case he raised. We received a response from Stephanie Casway, the journal’s managing editor, with a formal statement from the journal:
The journal adheres to the guidelines established by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). In keeping with our policies, we do not comment on ongoing or completed investigations. We approach retractions with care, ensuring they are issued deliberately, responsibly, and in accordance with ethical standards.
The retraction is Mol’s second. In 2021, he and the same group of colleagues retracted a paper after they found “a data analysis error resulting in a different conclusion,” according to the notice. They later republished a corrected version. One other paper of Mol’s with a different group of collaborators has received an erratum.
Mol told us he expected such retractions of his papers after he started whistleblowing on problematic articles, and he expects “some more of these unintended errors will come up.”
“The big problem is that almost everyone in the academic and clinical community is looking away” from the problem of untrustworthy trials in women’s health, he said. He estimates “at least 30%” of the literature in the field may be unreliable. A relatively small group of authors and institutions “contributes to this large volume of problematic papers,” he said, and “peer review has not been picking this up.”
Not many in the field speak out about the problem, he said.
As a result, the ones who do receive “the full monty,” he said. “Still, for me, it is worth it in view of the 275 retracted papers and 100 expressions of concern” for unreliable papers he has flagged, “and more important, the awareness that has been raised and the system changes that we have already seen with many journals and publishers.”
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