A New Record for Retractions?

[Dead_Parrot]

Impressive. This guy makes Jan Hendrik Schön look like a rank amateur....

Editors representing 23 journals have publicly asked officials at seven Japanese institutions to investigate the integrity of 193 publications authored by anesthesiologist Yoshitaka Fujii.

As reported yesterday by Retraction Watch, questions were first raised about Fujii's work a decade ago. Tokyo-based Toho University, his most recent employer, dismissed him in February for not following ethical review procedures in producing eight of nine papers investigated by an internal committee. (Fujii agreed to retract those papers, according to a statement on the university's Web site.)

On 8 March, the journal Anaesthesia published an analysis questioning data in 168 of Fujii's papers. Now the group of editors, mostly from journals focusing on anesthesiology, is planning to retract what may be Fujii's entire English language body of work if the institutions with which he was affiliated cannot confirm that the studies took place, that the original research data have been verified, and that the studies had been properly reviewed in advance for ethical considerations. (A link to the Joint Editors-in-Chief Request is on the Anesthesia & Analgesia Web site.)

Given the results of the Toho University investigation, getting those confirmations might be problematic. According to Ken Takamatsu, dean of the university's faculty of medicine, Fujii told Toho's investigating committee that he had discarded the experimental data for all of the studies then being questioned, but he claimed there had been no fabrication. "We have no evidence to say there was fabrication, but we don't think the papers are truthful," Takamatsu told ScienceInsider. Kazutoshi Shibuya, who chairs the university's ethics committee, says the panel did determine that Fujii deliberately bypassed ethical procedures in eight of nine cases.

More: http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/04/a-new-record-for-retractions.html

[SheilaT]

1. Nowhere do they seem to state

exactly what he researched, or what kind of conclusions were drawn.

It never seems to fail that when someone's research is questioned, they never have the original data anymore. There ought to be a standard in science that the original data is retained forever.

On the other hand, the good news is that others are more or less constantly reviewing others' work.

[Dead_Parrot]

2. Well, they mention he's an anesthesiologist, so I'm guessing it's anaesthetics...