Statistical vigilantes: the war on scientific fraud – Science Weekly podcast

Hannah Devlin delves into the case of a shamed Japanese scientist to explore how statistical malpractice is damaging science - whether employed knowingly or not

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On paper, the Japanese anaesthesiologist Yoshitaka Fujii was a dazzling model of scientific productivity. Over two decades, he held posts at five institutions, associate positions at two more, and published more than 200 papers. In some years, he published a dozen randomised control trials - and it was this superhuman publication record that started to arouse suspicion among some of his colleagues. But it was only when a British doctor began scouring through the statistics in his papers that the phenomenal scale of Fujii's scientific fraud became clear.