Trinity College Dublin has complained to a number of science journals that data from the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (Tilda) has been misreported and even fabricated by Chinese researchers.
Paul Mahoney, the operations manager of Tilda, which is based at Trinity, has complained to three journals about research papers they published which purported to use data from Tilda, which is freely available to scientists. Two of the journals have since retracted papers, which were written by researchers from Nanchang University in China.
The details have been published by Retraction Watch, a science website that highlights when papers are corrected or withdrawn due to errors or fraud.
Mahoney told the website that one paper linking increased levels of serum glycosylated hemoglobin with depression among cancer patients over the age of 49, published this year in Clinical Interventions in Aging, was “the most flagrantly fraudulent”. He said it fabricated data about a biomarker which Tilda does not even collect. “[That] was the main flag, and catalyst to check the others,” he said.
The other papers he reviewed did not fabricate data, but misreported them in a variety of ways, such as inflating sample sizes to suit a hypothesis. In one paper on colorectal cancer, the Chinese researchers used a sample size far higher than what was available from Tilda data.
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Another paper, on links between chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and depression, evaluated the ability of the HE4 serum “for predicting depression events in these COPD patients” by using Tilda data. However, no such information is available from the Irish ageing study.
Mahoney said: “My inkling is that publicly available longitudinal datasets may be the most recently identified target of ‘paper mills’, offering the potential to write up articles to a template which outwardly are methodologically sound, but with adjustments made to present significant associations etc, where editors and peer reviewers could not possibly be expected to catch the malpractice.”
Mahoney told Retraction Watch that he had notified other journals about “questionable” studies using Tilda data.
Tilda, which began in 2009, is one of the largest studies ever carried out in Ireland. It aims to give insights into the health, social and financial circumstances of adults aged over 50.