Two former professors and a former graduate student at Osaka Dental University in Japan reused images between three published articles, according to the findings of an institutional investigation.
The school released the findings of its investigation in January, with a full report in Japanese. The university has not responded to our request for comment.
According to a machine translation of the report, the university found former graduate student Helin Xing, former assistant professor Isao Yamawaki, and former associate professor Yoichiro Taguchi were involved in misconduct. A recent paper of Taguchi’s lists his affiliation as Matsumoto Dental University in Nagano, Japan. He and Xing have not responded to our requests for comment. We were not able to find a current affiliation or email address for Yamawaki.
The university said it could not confirm misconduct for the first paper, which appeared in Dove Press’ International Journal of Nanomedicine in 2014. The university’s regulations at the time did not require retaining experimental records, and they were not preserved, according to the report. Because images in the other two articles were identical to images in the 2014 paper, the university determined the data in the later papers were fabricated.
In 2021, the journal retracted the article, citing “alleged image duplication observed in several figures.” Anonymous users on PubPeer had posted about the alleged duplications earlier that year. The authors did not respond to the journal’s queries about the images, according to the notice. Xing was first author on the paper, on which Taguchi was a coauthor. The paper has been cited 55 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
The second paper in the university’s investigation appeared in 2015 in the Journal of Periodontology, a title of the American Academy of Periodontology. In August 2021, an anonymous user left a comment on PubPeer highlighting areas of similarity in two figures. The investigation report does not address these alleged duplications, only the images found to be identical to images from the 2014 paper, without specifying which figures. Xing was the first and corresponding author of the paper and conducted the experiment, according to the investigators. Because Taguchi supervised the research and could have verified the experimental results, the university found he was responsible for the paper’s content.
Osaka Dental University has asked for the journal to retract the paper, according to the report, but it remains unmarked. Effie Ioannidou, the editor in chief of the title, has not responded to our request for comment. The paper has been cited four times.
Yamawaki was the first author of the third paper investigators examined, which appeared in the Journal of Periodontal Research in 2017. The article has been cited 19 times.
Taguchi was the second and corresponding author, and requested its retraction, according to the report. The retraction notice, published in August 2024, cites the authors’ request and an investigation by the university “which determined that this article contains data that the first two authors had fabricated/falsified in Figures 1 and 5, respectively.” The publisher’s own investigation “confirmed duplication of previously published images,” the notice stated.
The university report attributed the misconduct to sloppy data management, a lack of awareness of research ethics, and inappropriate guidance from supervisors.
Yamawaki and Taguchi resigned voluntarily, according to the report.
Xing and Yamawaki received degrees in 2014 and 2017, respectively, and the titles of their dissertations are identical to those of the retracted articles on which they were the first authors.
Hat tip: lemonstoism, world fluctuation watch.
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