A network of anaesthesiology papers out of Turkey’s University of Health Sciences is working its way through a slow, publisher-by-publisher retraction process, five years after the first suspicious manuscript reached an editor’s desk. Retraction Watch reported on 4 August 2026 that 30 papers connected to the network have been flagged on PubPeer, that professor Reyhan Polat has had four papers retracted, and that a paper co-authored by her department head, professor Julide Ergil, has also been retracted — with a wider review of Ergil’s work now open at the European Society of Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care (ESAIC).
This is a live, multi-institution case involving named, practising clinicians. The distinctions below matter: a PubPeer flag is a public question, not a finding; a journal retraction is a formal editorial action; and an open publisher review is neither. We have kept those distinct throughout, and cited Retraction Watch’s own reporting — the only primary account currently available — for every factual claim below.
How the network came to light
According to Retraction Watch, the case traces to July 2021, when John Loadsman — an anaesthesiologist at the University of Sydney and then editor-in-chief of the journal Anaesthesia and Intensive Care — received a manuscript submission he considered suspicious, from Polat. That single submission prompted Loadsman to look more broadly at Polat’s published output, which in turn surfaced apparent problems in work by colleagues at the University of Health Sciences in Ankara, including Ergil, who chairs Polat’s department and serves as president of the Turkish Society of Anaesthesiology and Reanimation.
René Aquarius, a neurosurgery researcher at Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, joined the effort in 2024. Aquarius compiled a spreadsheet covering 30 papers connected to the network and shared it directly with the relevant publishers that year. Retraction Watch reports that Ergil or Polat is a named author on seven of those 30 flagged papers; the remaining papers involve other members of the same collaborator network.
What has actually been retracted
Of the 30 flagged papers, action has followed for only a handful so far — which is the gap the headline figures above are pointing at. Retraction Watch reports that all four papers Loadsman specifically flagged as authored by Polat have now been retracted. Only one of the four is individually identified in the reporting: a paper in Elsevier’s Journal of Clinical Anesthesia, retracted in June 2026.
Separately, a 2019 paper co-authored by Ergil has been retracted after reviewers found it reused histology images from three earlier, unrelated publications. Ergil told Retraction Watch the overlap resulted from what she described as an “inadvertent archival mix-up” on the part of a pathologist she had worked with, saying she “had relied in good faith” on materials supplied by specialists and “had no independent means of verifying whether any of the materials… had previously been used.” Retraction Watch states that Polat did not respond to its requests for comment. No response from Polat should be read as neither an admission nor a denial — simply as no public statement having been reported.
The pattern of evidence, by type
Retraction Watch’s account, drawing on Loadsman’s and Aquarius’s review, groups the flagged problems into several recurring evidence types. None of these alone proves misconduct — image and data anomalies can have innocent explanations, which is precisely the question a formal journal investigation is supposed to resolve — but each points to a different kind of irregularity:
| Evidence type | What it typically indicates |
|---|---|
| Duplicated data blocks within a raw spreadsheet | The same underlying dataset may have been reused and presented as results from a separate study or arm |
| Reported error bars that do not bracket the stated mean | The summary statistics and the underlying data are internally inconsistent, suggesting fabricated or altered values |
| Anxiety-scale or questionnaire scores outside the instrument’s possible range | Values that cannot exist on the scale used, indicating fabrication rather than measurement or transcription error |
| Identical standard deviations recurring across ostensibly different experiments | Statistically improbable repetition, consistent with copied rather than independently measured data |
| Repeated histology or clinical images across figures | Apparent image reuse or “copy-paste,” the specific issue behind the 2019 Ergil-co-authored retraction |
| The same image appearing in unrelated studies by different author groups | Suggests a shared image bank or coordinated reuse across a wider collaborator network, not an isolated error |
Why most of the 30 haven’t moved
Aquarius told Retraction Watch that publisher response since the 2024 spreadsheet was shared has been inconsistent: “In many cases, nothing has happened.” Two of the open threads Retraction Watch names specifically: Termedia Publishing House is reviewing a 2015 paper published in Archives of Medical Science, and ESAIC — which counts Ergil among its senior members — has opened its own review of concerns raised about her work. ESAIC told Retraction Watch it “takes matters of scientific integrity seriously” and committed to an update by the end of August 2026.
That gap — 30 papers flagged, roughly five retracted to date across the two named authors — is the ordinary, if uncomfortable, pace of publisher-led integrity review: each retraction typically requires an independent editorial investigation, a right of reply for the author, and in many cases input from the author’s institution, none of which is fast even when a journal is acting in good faith. It is also exactly the kind of case NISO’s CREC recommended practice was designed to make more consistent — machine-readable, standardised communication of retractions, removals and expressions of concern, so that a paper’s status doesn’t depend on a reader correctly tracking a publisher’s individual notice.
What to watch next
Two concrete follow-ons are already on the calendar. ESAIC has committed to reporting the outcome of its Ergil review by 31 August 2026. And Termedia’s review of the 2015 Archives of Medical Science paper remains open, with no reported timeline. Beyond those two, the arithmetic of the case — 25 of the 30 flagged papers with no reported publisher action as of Retraction Watch’s 4 August reporting — makes it likely that further retractions or corrections tied to this network will surface over the coming months as individual journals complete their own reviews. We will treat each as a distinct action rather than folding it into this account: a correction is not a retraction, an expression of concern is not a retraction, and a closed publisher review that finds no misconduct is a legitimate possible outcome, not merely a delay.
This account is based solely on Retraction Watch’s 4 August 2026 reporting, the only primary source currently available on this case. CASRAI has not independently contacted Polat, Ergil, ESAIC or the publishers named. Where an individual’s response is quoted above, it is quoted from that reporting.
