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.

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.
 

Source https://retractionwatch.com/2026/08/04/anesthesiologists-earning-retractions-for-data-image-problems/

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