An accidental discovery of scientific fraud

You have recently decided to retract the paper of Hania et al. (2022).Thank you for inviting me to explain why I was suspicious about the originality of this paper which led to this retraction.I am currently working on a scoping review about flourishing mental health during the menopausal transition.First, I read around 250 papers after initial screening of titles and abstracts.Second, I started with the data extraction process in which at that point around 40 articles were extracted in an Excel datafile.I started to impute the data of the paper of Iioka and Komatsu (2015), but I discovered that in each of the columns, except for "study" and "country," Excel showed me the exact or almost exact answer with the information I wanted to extract.For some columns like the age range and mean age (SD), this might be possible as some articles use similar datasets.Yet, the further I worked on the extraction for this paper, the more suspicious I got because each column seemed to be identical to one particular article, the one of Hania et al. (2022).Especially the exact same key-findings of the exact same outcomes was disturbing.I started to compare the two papers more in depth to ensure I did not make a mistake.The 2015 article is about a stress management program for perimenopausal women conducted in Japan, while the 2022 article stems from Pakistan about a horticultural stress management program for perimenopausal symptoms.The latter study did refer to Iioka and Komatsu (2015) in their measurements section, so they were familiar with their work.The text does not give a direct indication of suspicion of plagiarism as there are not many textual similarities in the abstract, introduction and

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• Retracted Article

  Alishba Hania, Zhidan Wang et al.•Health Care For Women International•2022

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