Category: japan retractions

Earlier this month, Tokushima University in Japan announced it was revoking a student’s PhD degree — but for a somewhat unusual reason.

The student didn’t appear to commit misconduct. Rather, the authors discovered a series of errors that invalidated the paper’s central conclusion.

The case has us wondering about how universities should respond when they discover some of a PhD student’s research is no longer valid — especially when there is no suspicion of misconduct.

Based on our Google translation of the more detailed description of what happened, the university concluded the problem was the result of the authors’ “simple mistakes:”

Continue reading A university is revoking a student’s PhD — but not because of misconduct

When someone has to retract a paper for misconduct, what are the odds they will do it again? And how can we use that information to stop repeat offenders? Those are the questions that  Toshio Kuroki of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and Akira Ukawa of RIKEN set out to tackle in their new paper, appearing in Accountability in Research. Not surprisingly, they found that people with multiple retractions are more likely than others to have another — and when people have at least five retractions, the odds are significantly higher.

Retraction Watch: Why did you decide to examine the chances of researchers retracting additional papers?

Continue reading How often do scientists who commit misconduct do it again?

Kyoto University has “punitively dismissed” a researcher found guilty of falsifying nearly all of the figures in a 2017 stem cell paper.  

According to an announcement Wednesday, the university fired the paper’s corresponding author, Kohei Yamamizu, after determining he had fabricated and falsified data in all but one figure in the 2017 Stem Cell Reports paper. The findings of the investigation, which were announced in January, found that Yamamizu, who worked at the Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (CiRA), was the only person responsible for the manipulation.

But CiRA’s director, Shinya Yamanaka—who shared a Nobel Prize for his work in stem cell biology—has taken responsibility for the incident as well. In an official statement, Yamanaka said he felt “a strong responsibility for not having prevented research misconduct at our institute:”
Continue reading Stem cell paper falsification leads to firing; Nobelist also penalized