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.

Now a sleuth who has identified several hundred articles describing clinical women’s health research with untrustworthy data, leading to nearly 300 retractions, has lost one of his own papers for duplicate publication. The retracted paper originally appeared in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology in March 2019. 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, 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.

Source https://retractionwatch.com/2025/10/15/sleuth-loses-paper-for-duplicate-publication-after-flagging-hundreds-of-untrustworthy-articles/

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