In July 2021, John Loadsman received a manuscript about a clinical trial that immediately roused his suspicion. Then the editor-in-chief of Anaesthesia and Intensive Care, Loadsman asked the authors for the raw data.
They weren’t pretty. “When I looked carefully at the spreadsheet, I could see entire blocks of data that were repeated,” recalled Loadsman, an anesthesiologist and scientific sleuth at the University of Sydney. “It was obvious that this was cooked.”
He rejected the manuscript, informing both the corresponding author, Reyhan Polat of the University of Health Sciences in Ankara and Etlik City Hospital, in Turkey, and her institution about his concerns. He also made a mental note to have a look at the researcher’s published work. Over the following years, that effort drew in another sleuth and eventually prompted inquiries into more than two dozen papers by a network of researchers in Turkey.
So far, Loadsman has flagged four papers by Polat, a professor of anesthesiology and vice president of the Anesthesiology and Reanimation Specialists Society, a national organization.
Some of the articles showed error bars for mean values that, inexplicably, did not include the means themselves, Loadsman pointed out on PubPeer. Another contained impossible scores on an anxiety scale, among other problems. The raw data also contained inexplicable duplications.
Polat was first author on two of the articles, all of which have now been retracted – in some cases years after Loadsman alerted the publishers to the problems; the latest retraction notice appeared in June in Elsevier’s Journal of Clinical Anesthesia.
Polat, who has led several clinical trials, did not respond to requests for comment.
The field of anesthesiology has seen its share of fabricated research – or, in Loadsman’s words, “large volumes of fraudulent crap.” In 2009, our cofounder Adam Marcus broke the story about Scott Reuben, an American anesthesiology researcher who faked data in numerous clinical trials. The Retraction Watch Leaderboard includes five anesthesiologists, two of whom occupy the top two slots.
As Loadsman discovered, two of the now-retracted papers were coauthored by Polat’s head of department, Jülide Ergil. Like Polat, Ergil is a professor at the University of Health Sciences. She is also president of the Turkish Society of Anaesthesiology and Reanimation and earlier this year was made a fellow of the European Society of Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care. The organization describes the fellowship as a “prestigious honour” recognizing “doctors who demonstrate integrity, clinical excellence, and dedication to patient care.”
Ergil also had other problematic publications, Loadsman found. In 2024, he teamed up with fellow sleuth René Aquarius, a neurosurgery researcher at Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and the two dug into the Turkish anesthesiologists’ publications. They found lots to worry about.
One paper from 2015 on which Ergil was first author contained a table with nine values for standard deviations that exactly matched data in a 2012 paper by the same group, although the two publications purported to report on different experiments. (Ergil was not among the authors on the earlier article.)
A histology image in Ergil’s article, published in Archives of Medical Science, also showed a repeated pattern suggesting “copy-pasting in the digital file,” according to Aquarius.
“As first author, you’re probably in the best position to notice that something is wrong or something is incorrect,” he told us.
The problems extended beyond Ergil and Polat. Some of the images in the 2015 paper later turned up in studies from 2019 and 2020 on which neither researcher was an author, Aquarius and Loadsman discovered. The 2019 paper, which included images from three earlier publications, has since been retracted.
Ergil told us she had not been involved in the “histopathological evaluations” for the 2015 paper, but had “relied in good faith on the pathological assessments and images provided by the responsible specialist.” She had been in touch with “the responsible pathologist,” she said, and the pathologist had explained that “an inadvertent archival mix-up occurred during the preparation of a separate article published in 2019, resulting in the inclusion of an incorrect image.”
Her lack of involvement in “conducting the animal experiments, generating laboratory data, preparing histopathological specimens, selecting pathology images, or performing statistical analyses” was also why she wasn’t aware of the data duplication. “I had no independent means of verifying whether any of the materials provided to me had previously been used in other publications.”
As for the issues Loadsman and Aquarius had found in her other works, including the retracted paper, she said her role on each was limited to reviewing and revising the manuscript, not the experiments or statistical analysis.
An editor at Termedia Publishing House, which publishes Archives of Medical Science, said the company was looking into the 2015 paper.
The European Society of Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care is also reviewing the concerns over Ergil’s work. The society “takes matters of scientific integrity seriously,” a spokesperson said, adding that it would provide an update by the end of August.
In total, Loadsman and Aquarius have flagged 30 papers by the same network of Turkish researchers on PubPeer, with Ergil or Polat involved in seven of the publications. There could be more questionable works, Aquarius said, but at some point he had to “draw a line in the sand because I don’t want to spend more time on this.”
In 2024, Aquarius shared a spreadsheet listing the 30 papers with publishers. “In many cases, nothing has happened,” he said.
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What is the deal with anesthesiology and fabricated results???