Hanover
Following an investigation, Dartmouth’s provost office found that Dr. H. Gilbert Welch, a pioneering researcher on aggressive medical screenings and over-diagnoses, utilized material from a colleague’s research in a paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2016.
The paper, titled “Breast-Cancer Tumor size, Overdiagnosis, and Mammography Screening Effectiveness,” built upon Welch’s earlier research and concluded that mammograms can result in the treatment of breast tumors that do not present a mortal risk to women.
Samir Soneji, a demographer at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, alleged that research and methodologies he developed jointly with Hiram Beltran-Sanchez, a researcher at UCLA, and which Soneji later provided to Welch upon request was incorporated without credit into the medical journal paper, of which Welch served as the co-author.
When he discovered his and the colleague’s work had surfaced in the paper, Soneji filed a complaint with Dartmouth’s provost office, Soneji said in an interview on Monday. That launched a 21-month investigation organized by the provost’s office that led to a harshly worded conclusion in favor of Soneji and his colleague’s complaint.
The college’s provost office, after a review, found that Welch “engaged in research misconduct, namely plagiarism, by knowingly, intentionally, or recklessly appropriating the ideas, processes, results or words of (Soneji and Beltran-Sanchez) without giving then appropriate credit, and that these actions represented departure from accepted practices of the relevant research community,” according to a June 14 letter to Soneji from Interim Provost David Kotz, which Soneji provided to the Valley News.
In an email to the Valley News on Monday, Welch said, “I strongly disagree with the Dartmouth finding,” and added that both the United States Office of Research Integrity, the federal office responsible for investigating misconduct in research funded by government, and the New England Journal of Medicine “have reviewed this matter and have judged it to be an authorship or credit dispute.”
Dartmouth College spokeswoman Diana Lawrence, in a prepared statement, said “Dartmouth is committed to the highest standards of research integrity and expects all faculty members to respect the rules and norms of academic scholarship. We have reviewed this matter in accordance with our Research Misconduct Policy and Procedures and have kept the federal Office of Research Integrity informed throughout this process in conformance with regulatory requirements.”
Because “this is a confidential personnel matter, and out of respect for the privacy of all parties involved, we are unable to comment on any details of the investigation at this time,” she added.
Dartmouth’s conclusion that Welch had engaged in “research misconduct” was first reported by Retraction Watch, a news site that reports on retractions in the science community.
The news comes less than three weeks after Dartmouth barred two top Dartmouth Institute officials from its campus and office buildings pending an investigation.
Last month, Elliott Fisher, director of The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, and Adam Keller, the institute’s chief of strategy and operations, were both placed on administrative leave amid a probe into conduct in the workplace.
Lawrence, the spokeswoman, said that investigation is not related to the Welch matter.
Soneji, both in the interview and supported by documents and communications between Dartmouth and himself that he shared with the Valley News, said that he first revealed his and Beltran-Sanchez’s research results during a May 2015 workshop at Dartmouth that was attended by Welch.
The research involved data and methodologies relating to “quantifying the contribution of breast cancer screening,” according to an email summarizing the events that Soneji later sent to senior officials at the Dartmouth Institute to complain about Welch allegedly appropriating the research.
Subsequent to the workshop, according to Soneji’s complaint, he met with Welch in his office, where Welch “said that he had never thought of my research ideas to a) compute the share of incident breast cancers by tumor size … and b) use the temporal patterns in tumor size-specific incidence rates to quantify the contribution of breast cancer screening.”
Soneji said that Welch also followed up that meeting by emailing him to request a copy of one of the slides Soneji presented in the workshop. Soneji said he obliged, additionally noting in his email to Welch that “if this result/figure ultimately becomes part of a paper, I’d like to the opportunity to be coauthor (sorry if this comes across as a bit odd — I’ve had a few negative experiences this year when sharing results),” according to a copy of the email Soneji shared with the Valley News.
Welch responded: “No worries about this appearing in a paper — this is for class (less for content, more for the importance of denominators). Sorry to hear you have been burned in sharing results.”
But when Soneji saw the October 2016 New England Journal of Medicine paper that Welch had co-authored with three other researchers — none of the others were cited in the complaint and Soneji said they had no role in using his and Beltran-Sanchez’s research — he was stunned by what he saw.
“I believe Professor Welch appropriated my research ideas and research results,” Soneji wrote in his complaint.
Soneji pointed to a specific graph of plotted data in the paper that illustrates “breast-cancer tumor size distribution and size-specific incidence among women 40 years of age or older in the U.S., 1975-2012,” and said that it “is based on my research ideas and research results I shared with Professor Welch. This appropriation of my research ideas and results occurred without my knowledge or consent.”
Despite the determination from Dartmouth’s provost office that Welch had engaged in “plagiarism” by adopting Soneji’s and Beltran-Sanchez’s research into his paper, the New England Journal of Medicine has declined to describe the use of the material as plagiarized and gingerly sidestepped the college’s finding in an Aug. 10 letter it sent to the provost’s office.
Referring to what it called “alleged research misconduct,” the Journal downplayed Soneji and Beltran-Sanchez’s complaint as an “authorship dispute.”
“The complainant party in this matter claims that he was not given adequate recognition for his contribution to the work we published,” according to a copy of the letter provided to the Valley News by Soneji. “We do not deem this sufficient grounds for retraction of the article.”
The Journal editors who wrote the letter added that, “we are happy to work with you and the article authors to reach a solution whereby sufficient acknowledgment is given so that the contribution of the complainant is adequately recognized.”
Welch, in his email to the Valley News, was vigorous in his defense.
“The public should know that no one is questioning the article’s data and findings. There is no allegation of fabrication or falsification of data — and the article has not been retracted.
“Instead the allegation is ‘idea plagiarism.’ There been no allegation of any other misconduct: the underlying data are publicly available — all the analyses, all the figures and all the writing in the article are my co-authors and mine.
“For the past 20 years, I have investigated the effects of efforts to detect cancer early and this paper was a natural progression of my work. Even then, the idea that changes in tumor size and stage provide insight into the effectiveness of screening predates me. These ideas certainly do not originate with the complainant,” he said.
“In short, this dispute is about credit — not about the validity of the work,” Welch said.
John Lippman can be reached at jlippman@vnews.com.
