Leading Australian scientist exposed for falsifying data in international studies

A leading Australian scientist has resigned in the wake of revelations that she doctored research data in two esteemed international journals.

Anna Ahimastos wrote a number of academic papers published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and the American Heart Association.

Ahimastos - a recipient of Victoria's Tall Poppy in 2011, an award for outstanding achievement in science - was working for Melbourne's well respected Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute when she produced the data.

An internal analysis of the results by the organisation later turned up the anomalies, which triggered an investigation.

Ahimastos, the author of 23 academic papers, was questioned about the data and admitted to making up some of it up.

The doctored results specifically related to whether the drug Ramipril or Prilace, a well-known blood pressure medication, could help sufferers of peripheral artery disease to walk without pain.

Patients were supposedly able to walk pain-free for long periods after almost six months on the drug, the study found.

Bronwyn Kingwell, a spokesperson for the Institute, told the Australian Broadcast Coorporation (ABC) on Thursday the disgraced researcher had resigned.

"These actions compromised the overall findings of the study and so we moved quickly to correct the public record by retracting the relevant papers," Kingwell said.

"The institute does take these matters very seriously and every effort has been made to correct the record and contact all affected parties as quickly as possible."

Retraction of an entire research paper is extremely rare but data is regularly updated and corrected, according to Australia's chair of the Committee on Publication Ethics, Dr Virginia Barbour.

Barbour said Ahimastos' actions were understandable in the current academic climate.

"If you talk to academics nowadays, there is a real publish-or- perish culture," she told the ABC on Thursday.

"A study in the UK last year found...researchers explicitly said the pressure to publish led them to cut corners, which is a pretty alarming finding."

"We do feel one of the problems is that authors are pressured to publish, and publish in very high journals." Endi