New Fake Data Record Holder

A reader alerted me to the new fake data record holder from Japan, displacing the current German record holder, Joachim Boldt, with only 88 retractions to his name, according to Retraction Watch. Both Retraction Watch and ars technica report on the Japanese anesthesiologist Dr. Yoshitaka Fujii from the medical school of Toho University. Fujii has published 212 papers, but the data to back up the papers can only be found for 3. Currently, 172 papers have been found to contain fabricated data. He also apparently forged signatures of supposed co-authors.

J. B. Carlisle published a statistical paper in Anesthesia in May 2012 ( DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2044.2012.07128.x) entitled "The analysis of 168 randomised controlled trials to test data integrity":

"The published distributions of 28/33 variables (85%) were inconsistent with the expected distributions, such that the likelihood of their occurring ranged from 1 in 25 to less than 1 in 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 (1 in 10³³), equivalent to p values of 0.04 to < 1 × 10⁻³³, respectively."

Highly unlikely, that. The university then started an investigation into this research, which was published in over 20 journals. They have just published their report. A comment on Retraction Watch hits the nail on the head: "Anesthesiologists need to WAKE UP to fraud".