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.
Excluding one 2010 retraction, the Boldt case accounts for 87 (49%) of the 176 retractions for the entire EU-27 thus far in 2011.
According to the IEEExplore database, this author has allegedly fabricated data in 39 publications and co-authors of 14 additional publications.
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.
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.
These two authors account for 40 (16%) of all 263 retractions for Japan.
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.
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.