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. 2012 Oct 24;7(10):e44118. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0044118

Table 4. The top “repeat offenders” are collectively responsible for 52% of the world’s retractions due to alleged research misconduct.

Researcher Retraction years Country Field of study Number ofretractions Justification givenfor retractions
Joachim Boldt1 2010–2011 Germany Anesthesiology 88 Lack of IRB approval
Adrian Maxim2 2007 USA Electrical engineering 48 Alleged data fraud andfictitious co-authors
H. Zhong3 2010 China Chemistry 43 Alleged data fraud
Jon Hendrick Schön4 2002–2004 USA Physics 33 Alleged data fraud
T. Liu3 2010 China Chemistry 29 Alleged data fraud
Robert A. Slutsky4 1985–1987 USA Cardiology 25 Alleged data fraud
Scott S. Reuben4 2009–2010 USA Anesthesiology 24 Alleged data fraud
Naoki Mori5 2010–2011 Japan Oncology 23 Alleged data fraud
Friedhelm Herrmann6 1997–2003 Germany Oncology 22 Alleged data fraud
John R. Darsee4 1982–1984 USA Cardiology 19 Alleged data fraud
Pattium Chiranjeevi7 2008 India Chemistry 19 Plagiarism
Wataru Matsuyama5 2007–2010 Japan Immunology 17 Alleged data fraud
Suresh Radhakrishnan8 2010 USA Immunology 15 Alleged data fraud
M. Quik, G. Goldstein and collaborators 1993–1994 Canada Physiology 15 Artifact (contamination)
Jon Sudbø9 2006–2007 Finland Oncology 14 Alleged data fraud

These cases distort figures for individual journals, years, countries and subdisciplines, and are distributed throughout North America, Europe and Asia. Nine of the 15 are in medical fields.

1

Excluding one 2010 retraction, the Boldt case accounts for 87 (49%) of the 176 retractions for the entire EU-27 thus far in 2011.

2

According to the IEEExplore database, this author has allegedly fabricated data in 39 publications and co-authors of 14 additional publications.

3

The 72 retractions of these two authors represent 34% of China’s 210 retractions for 2010 and 8.9% of all 811 retractions for China.

4

These four authors account for 101 (7.5%) of all 1,355 USA retractions. It is noteworthy that Dr. Schön’s retractions include 10 articles from Science and 7 from Nature.

5

These two authors account for 40 (16%) of all 263 retractions for Japan.

7

This author accounts for 19 (6.8%) of all 280 retractions for India. Despite only 19 retractions, an institutional review alleged “plagiarizing and/or falsifying more than 70 research papers” [34] by this author.

1–6,8–9,

Including 39 of Dr. Maxim’s articles with allegedly fabricated data, these 13 authors account for 391 (54%) of the world total of 725 retractions due to alleged research misconduct.