AHA Concerned Over Possible Image Fraud in Five Papers

When this researcher, Mastubata, commits fraud (assuming he did), he isn't simply playing with himself, he is playing with all of us.

Five papers coauthored by Dr Hiroaki Matsubara (Kyoto Prefectural University, Japan) may contain manipulated or copied images [1].

The Retraction Watch blog first reported that the American Heart Association (AHA) has issued a notice of concern about five papers appearing in three AHA-published journals — Circulation, Circulation Research, and Hypertension — between 2001 and 2004 [2,3,4,5,6].

All of the papers were coauthored by Matsubara, and some of the work in doubt was conducted when Matsubara was at Kansai Medical University in Osaka, Japan. He joined the Kyoto faculty in 2003. Matsubara is perhaps best known for his work on the KYOTO HEART study of the angiotensin-receptor blocker (ARB) valsartan (Diovan, Novartis).

The AHA's notice states that concerns about several figures in these papers came to the organization's attention "in a public manner" and therefore, "after reviewing these concerns, we have asked the institution, Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine, to investigate the allegations. Until we learn the outcome, we feel it is best to post this expression of concern to alert our readers that concerns about these articles have been raised."

The "public manner" AHA refers to was a series of posts in English on the Abnormal Science Blog, mainly devoted to scientific misconduct and transparency issues in Germany, run by Dr Jörg Zwirner. The blog states that a whistleblower pointed out figures and blot-test images in these papers that appear to be manipulated. For example, Zwirner argues the papers contain "extensive reuse and mutual exchange of data, in particular Western and Northern Blot bands, [and] a single band has been reused up to eight times in distinct blots. . . . Band images from 'real' blots may have been digitally reassembled into new blot images pretending to be derived from distinct experimental settings."

Well this should make you feel comfortable with the quality of the research that gets published.

Of course, Fitness Watch readers have long known not to believe everything that researchers and journals put out.