Dartmouth Professor Plagiarized His Colleague, University Says

H. Gilbert Welch, a health policy expert who has advocated against superfluous cancer screening, published another Dartmouth researcher’s work, according to the university administration.

Written byJef Akst

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H. Gilbert Welch

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Update (September 13): H. Gilbert Welch announced his resignation from Dartmouth College today. “I feel that I can no longer participate in the research misconduct process against me—as I fear my participation only serves to validate it,” he writes in an email to colleagues, STAT News reported.

When Dartmouth College Professor H. Gilbert Welch published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2016 arguing that mammograms can lead to the treatment of non-life-threatening tumors, he was “appropriating the ideas, processes, results or words of Complainants without giving them appropriate credit,” according to a letter by Dartmouth Interim Provost David Kotz, obtained by Retraction Watch and STAT News.

Welch and his colleagues argued that mammograms are more likely to lead to unnecessary treatment than to save lives, drawing headlines from the press and citations from fellow researchers. In fact, the NEJM paper ranks in the top 1 percent ...

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Meet the Author

Jef Akst
Jef (an unusual nickname for Jennifer) got her master’s degree from Indiana University in April 2009 studying the mating behavior of seahorses. After four years of diving off the Gulf Coast of Tampa and performing behavioral experiments at the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga, she left research to pursue a career in science writing. As The Scientist's managing editor, Jef edited features and oversaw the production of the TS Digest and quarterly print magazine. In 2022, her feature on uterus transplantation earned first place in the trade category of the Awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism. She is a member of the National Association of Science Writers.
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