Researcher at the center of an epic fraud remains an enigma to those who exposed him

[Dr Carrot]

Really interesting piece from Science magazine. Very much worth your time to read.

Basically, a researcher made up whole trials, his co-authors put their names on his papers without checking anything, peer review failed to spot numerous problems with the studies, journals failed to react to red flags raised after publication.

The first thing that went through Alison Avenell's head when she heard Yoshihiro Sato had died was that it might be a trick. It was March 2017, and in the previous years, Avenell, a clinical nutritionist at the University of Aberdeen in the United Kingdom, had spent thousands of hours combing through Sato's papers, together with three colleagues in New Zealand. They had discovered that Sato, a bone researcher at a hospital in southern Japan, had fabricated data for dozens of clinical trials published in international journals. "With so much going on, so much fabrication, you just wonder if it's convenient for the person to go and hide," Avenell says.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018...ic-fraud-remains-enigma-those-who-exposed-him

 

[Hutan]

"Journals don't really like going back to investigate when things go wrong," Grey concludes. "They complain that it's time-consuming and laborious and difficult." (It is all of that, says Avenell, "and no one ever thanks you for it.") The group says investigations of this scale should not be handled by journals or institutions; it has suggested a levy on journals to fund an independent investigative body.

 

[James]

Not only journals that are failing as gatekeepers when many universities will defend researchers for the funding that accompanies them