Stem cell researcher’s retraction count may near two dozen

A stem cell researcher in Japan could end up with 23 retractions after officials at his former institution confirmed that he’d committed research misconduct in nearly two dozen papers. 

According to a report released last week by Aichi Gakuin University, Nobuaki Ozeki misused images, fabricated data and recycled text in 20 papers. Ozeki has had 19 papers retracted to date, 17 of which are described in the analysis. The latest report — an offshoot of one in 2018 that found he had committed misconduct in three papers — expands Ozeki’s liability to 22 articles. 

Ozeki has roughly 40 indexed journal articles on his CV, however, and journals may decide to conduct their own investigations into his work. Articles in the International Journal of Medical Sciences, Differentiation, and the Journal of Endodontics were named in the report but so far remain intact. 

The report also lists several other faculty members at the university who were not directly involved in the misconduct but who bear some responsibility in the case by failing to call out inappropriate conduct. Two of them, unidentified except as part-time members of the dentistry school, offered to return their PhD degrees — and the university accepted. 

A copy of the report (in Japanese) is available here. A statement from Aichi Gakuin is available here. 

A yet-unretracted paper, on which Ozeki was first author, appeared in 2014 in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, and will be investigated separately because of the range of co-authors from around the world, according to the report  Titled “Differentiation of human skeletal muscle stem cells into odontoblasts is dependent on induction of α1 integrin expression,” the second author was Makio Mogi, whom the new investigation report identifies as “Professor B” (Ozeki, who retired in 2018, is “Professor A”). The article has been cited 20 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. 

According to a Google translation of the documents, Mogi, a member of the pharmacy faculty at the institution, and Ozeki collaborated on the 20 suspect papers. The report states that Mogi denied perpetrating fraud, but acknowledged a lack of oversight of Ozeki, who was his junior on the research projects. 

As for the JBC paper, Maria Isabel Casas, the data integrity manager for the journal, told us: 

Our records indicate that one of the authors on the paper in question did contact us with concerns, which set off an internal investigation that is still ongoing.

As you know, we take these matters very seriously. This case is being handled according to our standard policies, and we’ll make the outcome known publicly as soon as we have one.

Hat tip: Lemonstoism, author of World Fluctuation Watch

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