Blatant data fabrication in international research journals is now a cause of concern in Indian educational institutions.
Data fabrication in science journals
Recently, a senior faculty in the Department of Urology at the Government Medical College and Hospital 32 (GMCH32) is under scrutiny over an alleged case of data fabrication in a published international journal under his name.
The Director Principal of the Government Medical College and Hospital 32 (GMCH32), Dr. B S Chavan, has formed a fact-finding committee, which found all allegations about data fabrication to be true.
Chavan is now in charge of articulating guidelines that will prohibit and sanction faculty and students who are involved in plagiarism, falsifying, and unethical practice of research journals.
In a statement by the Director Principal:
Currently, we have no strict guidelines in sanctioning such unethical practices in our field. I have requested from another medical institution a copy of their guidelines, and we will work out our own version from there.
Chavan is referring to the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, as the source of the new guidelines they will use to regulate plagiarism and data fabrication on its international journals.
A study on robotic surgery
“A prospective, multi-institutional study of perioperative morbidities in the patients of renal cell carcinoma undergoing either open nephron-sparing surgery or robotic nephron-sparing surgery in fifty cases.” The research journal was discovered to be falsified, and tests are non-existent after confirmation that there was no robotic surgery facility in the hospitals mentioned in it.
The coauthors listed in the study also denied that they took part in any robotic surgery, as mentioned in the paper. One of the filled-in coauthors was an anesthetist, and the other had retired from the center prior to the study, making it more impossible to have involved in a robotic surgery study.
Based on the study, the data was gathered from the 50 patients who underwent open or robotic nephron-sparing surgery during the time frame of April 2016 up to March 2018. However, all of the hospitals mentioned in the journal didn’t have access to any robotic surgery facilities during the indicated time frame.
Featured image by Washington Square News
