A journal has retracted two case reports by a prolific Japanese anesthesiologist who appears to be embroiled in a misconduct investigation.
The two case studies, in JA Clinical Reports, were written by Hironobu Ueshima and Hiroshi Otake, of Showa University Hospital in Tokyo. Ueshima has roughly 170 publications to his name, according to Google Scholar, so we’ll be closely watching for developments in this case.
The two retracted articles in JA Clinical Reports, a Springer title affiliated with the Japanese Society of Anesthesiologists, appeared in 2016 and 2018. The first, “Successful clavicle fracture surgery performed under selective supraclavicular nerve block using the new subclavian approach,” now carries the following notice:
The Editor-in-Chief has retracted this article [1]. Following an investigation, the Editor-in-Chief has been informed by the authors that the relevant patient files are missing; consequently, the Editor-in-Chief has concluded that the case report and its findings are unreliable as the information cannot be verified.
That paper has been cited five times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. The second article, “Who performs the preoperative examination?,” has an identical statement. That paper has yet to be cited.
Our emails to Ueshima and the journal went unanswered.
The Japanese Society of Anesthesiologists was central to the largest case of research misconduct yet uncovered. Another anesthesiologist in that country, Yoshitaka Fujii, currently holds the top spot in our leaderboard, with 183 retractions. The society’s report on his case appears no longer to be available online.
It might be working on another major case.
John Loadsman, an Australian anesthesiologist and journal editor, who has worked on several misconduct cases in the field, told us:
It’s possible, although I cannot be certain, that these retractions are related to an institutional investigation that I understand to be currently underway as a result of a submission to Anaesthesia and Intensive Care earlier this year. Problems, similar to those recently described for another case, were evident in that submission reporting a randomised trial, and then potential issues were also noted in several randomised trials published in other journals by the same authors in the last few years. An institutional investigation was therefore requested and the editors of the other journals contacted. We await the results of that investigation, but in the meantime it is interesting to note that the three retractions to date are of case reports, not clinical trials, and that these have been retracted for “self-reported misconduct” or because “the relevant patient files are missing”. Problems with veracity in case reports aren’t something I have personally seen very much before, and while these authors have published a relatively small number of clinical trials, there is a rather long list of case reports. At this stage I don’t know how many of those might be under a cloud.
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