After delving into the topic in his popular scientific book “The Cheaters”, published in 2021, Kjell Asplund has a clear picture for himself: systematic cheat hunters have uncovered real major cheats in a number of cases.
– They have made very important contributions to the field of research. Some findings have had implications for clinical guidelines and clinical practice. It is very important that fraud is detected, says Kjell Asplund, who has led, among other things, several investigations – including one into the operations of surgeon Paolo Macchiarini.
He believes the most admirable and dazzling cheat hunter is the Dutch-American microbiologist Elisabeth Beck, who is known above all for taking suspicious photos.
-She's special! The tool she used in her major discoveries was only her eye.
Another doctor, British anesthesiologist John Carlisle, does not look for fraud with pictures, but instead collects absurd statistics. Using a homemade computer program, he separates real data from statistically improbable data.
In interviews, John Carlisle said he woke up at 4.30 every morning to fill out an Excel sheet with suspicious data before going to work at the hospital in the coastal town of Torquay.
It's a strategy that has paid off. John Carlyle helped uncover many of the 10 researchers who top the list. Retraction Watch, the US website that publishes data on retracted articles, lists those with the most retracted articles. One example is Japanese researcher Yoshitaka Fujii, who holds second place on the list with 172 retracted articles at the moment.
Joachim Boldt tops the list with a staggering 194 retracted articles.
Meanwhile, Kjell Asplund believes that scientific journals themselves will – and should become – increasingly better at spotting fraud themselves. John Carlyle's method actually inspired the New England Journal of Medicine to introduce a similar system. Most journals also use special software to check articles for possible plagiarism before publication.
-I think magazines will get more and more powerful styles. Naturally, there is a very high probability that they will be the first to detect cheaters, as Kjell Asplund says and continues:
– But now we also have artificial intelligence. There will be a conflict between those who use artificial intelligence to generate fraud and manipulation on the one hand, and those who use artificial intelligence to detect fraud on the other hand.
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