Japan's professor accused of fabricating research data

Source: Xinhua| 2017-08-01 21:19:03|Editor: ying
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TOKYO, Aug. 1 (Xinhua) -- The University of Tokyo, a top university in Japan, said on Tuesday that it had found five papers published on prestigious international journals by two of its researchers contained fabricated and falsified data.

The five papers, coauthored by Yoshinori Watanabe, a professor from the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences (IMCB) of the university, and Yuji Tanno, who had been a research associate when the misconduct happened, were published between 2008 and 2015 on prominent journals such as Science and Nature.

Watanabe won an Asahi Prize in 2015 for his contribution to clarifying the molecular mechanism related to meiosis.

The university said it will continue the probe on dozens of other papers published by Watanabe since he became a professor, and then decide on the punishment.

It will also discuss with the education ministry on returning the 1.5 billion yen (some 13.59 million U.S. dollars) research subsidies that Watanabe's laboratory had received for the five papers.

"It is utterly regrettable . . . We must think of rules and methods to prevent similar instances from happening again," Hiroo Fukuda, a vice president at the university, told a news conference.

The university said that it launched the investigation last year on 22 papers involving six laboratories after receiving a tip from an anonymous source pointing to data fabrication and other academic misconducts.

No misconduct was found in the rest of the 22 papers other than the five ones involving Watanabe, said the university.

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