Last month, the Japanese Society of Anesthesiologists permanently banned Yuhji Saitoh of the Yachiyo Medical Center and Tokyo Women’s Medical University for fraud and data manipulation. Saitoh was a frequent co-author of papers with Yoshitaka Fujii, an infamous fraudster within the anesthesia community.
“An editorial in anesthesiology-related journal ‘Anaesthesia’ outlining the alleged fraud cited numerous publications where it was almost certain that data manipulation and fraud had taken place,” said a statement released by the Japanese Society of Anesthesiologists. “The committee concluded that in the case of several other publications there were severe breaches of research ethics.” Retraction Watch, a blog dedicated to monitoring retractions of scientific papers, translated the statement.
This discovery comes five years after the society concluded that Fujii had retracted a record number of papers, with 172 of 212 papers including falsified data. Retraction Watch found that, of the 33 papers Saitoh retracted, 32 of them included Fujii as the co-author.
Prior to these findings, anesthesia fraud detective John Carlisle and a co-author investigated papers written by Saitoh, discovered that there was an extremely low possibility that the sampling was randomly assigned. “The high probability of non-random sampling and the repetition of lines in multiple graphs suggest that further scrutiny of Saitoh’s work is warranted,” said Carlisle in his paper of the findings.