https://retractionwatch.com/the-retraction-watch-leaderboard/
Tracking retractions as a window into the scientific process
The Retraction Watch Leaderboard
Who has the most retractions? Here’s our unofficial list (see notes on methodology), which we’ll update as more information comes to light:
Yoshitaka Fujii (total retractions: 183) See also: Final report of investigating committee, our reporting, additional coverage
Joachim Boldt (159) See also: Editors-in-chief statement, our coverage
Yoshihiro Sato (106) See also: our coverage
Ali Nazari (85) See also: our coverage
Jun Iwamoto (82) See also: our coverage
Diederik Stapel (58) See also: our coverage
Yuhji Saitoh (53) See also: our coverage
Adrian Maxim (48) See also: our coverage
Chen-Yuan (Peter) Chen (43) See also: SAGE, our coverage
Fazlul Sarkar (41) See also: our coverage
Shahaboddin Shamshirband (41) See also: our coverage
Hua Zhong (41) See also: journal notice
Shigeaki Kato (40) See also: our coverage
James Hunton (37) See also: our coverage
Hyung-In Moon (35) See also: our coverage
Antonio Orlandi (34) See also: our coverage
Amelec Viloria aka Jesus Silva (33) See also: our coverage
Jan Hendrik Schön (32) See also: our coverage
Dimitris Liakopoulos (31) (NB: We’re counting a book he co-authored as a single retraction. The book has 13 retracted chapters with DOIs that are not included in this figure.) See also: our coverage
Naoki Mori (31) See also: our coverage
Jose L Calvo-Guirado (30) See also: our coverage
Soon-Gi Shin (30) See also: our coverage
Bharat Aggarwal (29) See also: our coverage
Victor Grech (29) See also: our coverage
Tao Liu (29) See also: our coverage
Cheng-Wu Chen (28) See also: our coverage
A Salar Elahi (27) See also: our coverage
Prashant K Sharma (27) See also: our coverage
Richard L E Barnett (26) See also: our coverage
Dalibor Petkovic (25) See also: our coverage
Scott Reuben (25) See also: our coverage
We note that all of the top 31 are men, which agrees with the general findings of a 2013 paper suggesting that men are more likely to have papers retracted for fraud.
Notes:
Many accounts of the John Darsee story cite 80-plus retractions, which would place him third on the list, but Web of Science only lists 17, three of which are categorized as corrections. That’s not the only discrepancy. For example, Fujii has 138 retractions listed in Web of Science, compared to 183 as recommended by a university committee, while Reuben has 24, compared to the 22 named in this paper. We know that not everything ends up in Web of Science — Chen, for example, isn’t there at all — so we’ve used our judgment based on covering these cases to arrive at the highest numbers we could verify.
Shigeaki Kato is likely to end up with 43 retractions, based on the results of a university investigation.
All of this is a good reminder why the database we’ve built with the generous support of the MacArthur Foundation and Arnold Foundation will be useful.