Readers who have checked the Retraction Watch leaderboard lately may have picked up on something notable: One researcher, Joachim Boldt, has now been credited with 210 retractions – making him the first author (to our knowledge) with more than 200 retractions to his name.
Boldt’s new tally – representing about half of his roughly 400 publications – admittedly is an accounting change rather than new problems being identified. Some journals have only now come around to acting on the corrupt articles. In that sense, it reflects both progress and a frustrating lack of concern-slash-urgency on the part of the journals that have taken more than a decade to resolve the case.
One incident illustrates just how determined the leaders of the Karolinska Institute were to protect Paolo Macchiarini. In November of 2014, a leaked copy of the whistleblowers’ report came into the hands of the New York Times, which published an article titled “Leading Surgeon Is Accused of Misconduct in Experimental Transplant Operations.” The article detailed several of the most serious allegations against Macchiarini: that he had never obtained ethical permission to conduct his experiments, that his 2011 study in The Lancet had misrepresented the outcome of Beyene’s implant, and that of the three patients at the Karolinska Institute that Macchiarini had given synthetic implants, only Beyene had signed a consent form— and the form was dated two weeks after his surgery. The publicity generated by the article all but forced the Karolinska Institute to act. Anders Hamsten, the vice-chancellor, said he would ask for an external inquiry.
Retaliation against the whistleblowers came quickly. According to Simonson, the whistleblowers were told that they had violated patient privacy and would be fired immediately. That didn’t happen, but in December the Karolinska Institute informed the whistleblowers that the head of the cardiothoracic clinic would deliver a formal warning, the last step before an employee is terminated.
The Karolinska Institute also reported the whistleblowers to the police. “I was called down to the police and put in a room with no windows, with a tape recorder and a lawyer and a policeman in front of me, and interrogated. That was pretty scary,” Matthias Corbascio, a cardiothoracic surgeons says. “It was exactly what it’s like on television. And you know, it’s hard to be a tough guy in that room.”
A diabetes researcher who lost a defamation suit against a journal that marked four of his papers with expressions of concern now has four more papers flagged – by the same journal.
Diabetes, a journal of the American Diabetes Association (ADA), placed expressions of concern on four papers led or co-authored by Mario Saad, of the University of Campinas (Unicamp) in Brazil on October 23.
Saad sued the ADA in 2015 after Diabetes marked four other papers with similar notices. A judge dismissed the suit, and the journal later retracted the papers (for which we recognized them with a DiRT — Doing the Right Thing — award). Saad is now up to 19 retractions, by our count.
The German anesthesiologist Joachim Boldt has lost 20 more papers since January 2023, earning him the top spot in our leaderboard, with 184 retractions.
Boldt, readers may recall, was once one of the leading international figures in perioperative medicine. His work, particularly studies involving the use of fluid management during surgery, helped inform clinical guidelines that, thanks to his misdeeds, some experts believe may have put patients at risk for serious harm and even death.
Boldt has vaulted over another anesthesiologist, Yoshitaka Fujii, to take the crown (more on that in a moment) – although one might fairly ask: Why did it take so long?
In 2018, the journal Respiration was adamant that it wouldn’t retract a 2015 paper co-authored by once-respected transplant surgeon Paolo Macchiarini. Now, the editors at Respiration seem to have changed their mind.
Macchiarini is most well known for his controversial artificial windpipe implants. Seven out of the eight patients who had artificial windpipes implanted from Macchiarini suffered complications after the surgery.
In 2018, when The Lancetpulled two studies by once-celebrated transplant surgeon Paolo Macchiarini after he was found guilty of misconduct, we suggested in a post that the journal’s chapter of the long-running Macchiarini saga was finally over.
We were wrong.
Last week, the journalissuedexpressions of concern about a pair of papers by the Italian doctor, who is currently on probation after a court in Sweden convicted him of causing bodily harm to a patient.
A cancer researcher in Texas who once threatened to sue Retraction Watch is up to 30 retractions, the latest involving a 2011 article which earned a correction the following year.
The paper, which was corrected in 2012, has received 50 citations, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, all of which came after the correction. The latest of these references appears to be a recent preprint claiming to find that frankincense extract helps treat breast cancer.
Broccoli almost certainly is good for you — but just how good might have taken a bit of a hit with the retraction of a 12-year-old review on the vegetable’s health benefits by a notorious fraudster.
By our count, the retraction, which appeared in July, marks the 22nd for Das, formerly of the University of Connecticut, who died in 2013.
It’s also the fifth retraction for Das’ co-author, and former postdoc, Hannah Vasanthi; four of those papers were collaborations with Das but the most recent, in Carbohydrate Polymers, was not. Several other papers by Vasanthi have been flagged on PubPeer — over concerns about plagiarism, image issues and problematic data — and she has had at least four corrections and one expression of concern. (One article by Vasanthi that Elisabeth Bik identified in 2019 appears to contain text lifted from a 2010 article by Bharat Aggarwal, formerly of MD Anderson Cancer Center, whose name may be familiar to Retraction Watch readers.)
A decade has passed since the breaking of the scandal involving Joachim Boldt, a world-renowned critical care specialist who has held steady as the number two author on the Retraction Watch leaderboard. But the case continues to produce developments that have dramatically increased Boldt’s retraction tally.
Journals have retracted at least 53 papers by Boldt since May 2020, bringing his total number to 153, by our count. That includes 24 articles removed so far in 2021. In September 2020, the British Journal of Anaesthesia announced that it was retracting all but one of the more than two dozen Boldt papers that it had published — leaving the last one standing because it didn’t have solid evidence that it contained fabricated data.
The impetus for the purge was a 2018 report from Justus Liebig University (JLU) Medical School, where Boldt worked between 1982 and 1996. The university concluded that, among other things, Boldt appears to have fabricated data from several theses of students he helped supervise, publishing the doctored results without their knowledge.
