Kyoto University has fired a researcher after determining that he committed fraud in at least five papers about the deadly Kumamoto earthquake of 2006.
In a report released earlier this week (Sept 28), the institution said it found Aiming Lin guilty of 37 counts of “fraudulent activity” in four of the articles, not including a 2017 paper Lin published in Science which the journal retracted in 2019. The university suspended Lin for a year at the time.
Kyoto University said (courtesy of Google translate) earlier this month Lin was subject to “disciplinary dismissal” in the case:
As a result of conducting an investigation by the Investigation Committee based on Article 9 (1) of the Regulations on Promotion of Fair Research Activities at Kyoto University and Article 3 of the Investigation Guidelines for Misconduct in Research Activities at Kyoto University, four volumes In the paper, a total of 37 cases of fraudulent activity (fabrication / alteration) were found.
The four papers are:
- “Structural features and seismotectonic implications of coseismic surface ruptures produced by the 2016 M w 7.1 Kumamoto earthquake,” which appeared in the Journal of Seismology in 2017;
- “Coseismic conjugate faulting structures produced by the 2016 Mw 7.1 Kumamoto earthquake, Japan,” from 2017 in the Journal of Structural Geology;
- “Millennium Recurrence Interval of Morphogenic Earthquakes on the Seismogenic Fault Zone That Triggered the 2016 Mw 7.1 Kumamoto Earthquake, Southwest Japan,” from 2017 in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America;
- and a 2018 article in Scientific Reports titled “Recurrent large earthquakes related with an active fault-volcano system, southwest Japan.”
So far, none from the list has been retracted.
The report lists several other articles by Lin — either as sole author or in collaboration with other researchers — that do not appear to contain fraudulent data.
Lin isn’t the only researcher to have faked data in studies of the Kumamoto quake, which killed at least 50 people and injured thousands more. In 2019, we reported on the case of Yoshiya Hata, who resigned from his position at Osaka University in the wake of revelations that he’d made up findings in five published papers about the natural disaster.
Hat tip: Lemon-stoism, Author of world fluctuation watch
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