A university in Japan has revoked the doctoral degree of a former student found to have manipulated images and graphs in a dissertation and two published papers.
“Although our university has been working to raise awareness of research ethics in order to prevent research misconduct, it is extremely regrettable that such a situation has occurred,” Tohoku University President Hideo Ohno said in an announcement made on March 30 (translated from the Japanese using Google Translate).
The school did not name the former student, who was first author on both papers. But details mentioned in its investigation report (in Japanese) point to a researcher called Nan Li. Li was also named on a blog in Japan that covered the case (in Japanese).
We reached out to Tohoku for confirmation, but the school declined to comment.
According to a Google translation of Tohoku’s report, the former student admitted to “cutting and pasting” part of a figure in a paper and was found to have “deliberately committed misconduct.”
“Since the fabrication/falsification involved fraudulent acts in an important part of Article 1 and affected the conclusion, the degree of maliciousness of the act was judged to be ‘high,'” the report states, noting that “the article was retracted immediately after publication.”
A paper titled “Chloroplast proteotoxic stress-induced autophagy is involved in the degradation of chloroplast proteins in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii” was published in 2021 in Plant and Cell Physiology and retracted the same year. The affiliations of first author Nan Li were listed as Tohoku University and Liaocheng University in China.
The retraction notice reads:
Following article publication, the corresponding author flagged concerns over potential image manipulation and duplication of some of the Western blot data in Figures 5 and 9C, and the first author has since admitted to this image duplication. The senior author has been unable to verify or reproduce the data in these figures and as such confidence in the experiments and figures generated by the first author have been undermined (i.e. Figures 3B, 3C, 5, 6, 7C and 9C). Consequently, the authors and editors have agreed to retract this article. The first author wishes to express apologies to the other authors of this work, and all co-authors apologize to the general scientific community for the inconvenience caused.
The corresponding author of the paper, Masanori Izumi, did not respond to a request for comments.
According to Tohoku’s investigation, another paper by the former student contained a figure that was “cut and pasted” and the student “did not provide a sufficient explanation of the problem.”
The suspect figure “does not affect the conclusion of the paper,” the report states. But it constituted an “important part” of the student’s doctoral dissertation, titled “Mechanisms of UVB and UVA/Blue light inducible expression of CPD photolyase in de-etiolated Arabidopsis seedlings: UVR8-dependent/independent and cryptochrome-dependent pathways.”
One of Li’s papers, “UV-B-Induced CPD Photolyase Gene Expression is Regulated by UVR8-Dependent and -Independent Pathways in Arabidopsis,” published in Plant and Cell Physiology in 2015, was corrected in 2022. The correction notice reads:
The corresponding author contacted the journal in March 2022 with concerns about manipulation of Figs. 2B and 5C, which were compiled by the first author. Upon request of the journal editors, the authors repeated the experiments for the figures concerned and achieved similar results supporting the original conclusions of the work, as shown below. All other results in the paper were confirmed and validated by original supporting data and/or new reproducibility experiments supplied by the senior author. The editors are satisfied that the results and overall conclusions of the original work have not changed.
The corresponding author of the paper, Jun Hidema, did not answer a request for comments.
The investigative committee found that neither of the two corresponding authors on the former student’s papers was “involved in the misconduct.”
We could not ascertain Nan Li’s current affiliation.
Hat tip: Lemonstoism, author of World Fluctuation Watch
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Hats off to Tohoku University for doing that!
My observation is that when the Japanese detect fraud they root it out. That is very admirable.