Retraction count for gynecologic cancer researcher Takai grows to seven

Noriyuki Takai, a gynecologic cancer researcher at Oita University in Japan who retracted three papers last October, has four more retractions, these in Cancer Letters.

All but one of the notices reads as follows:

This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy).

This article has been retracted at the request of the Authors. Errors were identified in the original data which have affected several figure panels in the article.

Those three papers are:

• Ca²⁺/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase IV expression in epithelial ovarian cancer (cited 11 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge)
• Survivin expression correlates with clinical stage, histological grade, invasive behavior and survival rate in endometrial carcinoma (cited 91 times)
• Targeting calcium/calmodulin-dependence kinase I and II as a potential anti-proliferation remedy for endometrial carcinomas (cited 13 times)

The fourth notice, for “Novel target genes responsive to the anti-growth activity of triptolide in endometrial and ovarian cancer cells” (cited 8 times), suggests there’s far more to the story:

This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy).

This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief. The Editor in Chief has serious doubts about the handling and publication of data associated with the four panels represented in Figure 4.

We’ve contacted Takai and the editor of the journal for more details, and will update with anything we learn.

Update, 1:40 p.m. Eastern, 3/4/13: The journal tells us:

Errors were identified in the figure panels in the four retracted papers by an anonymous reader of Cancer Letters. The Editor pursued the allegations with the corresponding author who acknowledged that the figure panels did not accurately report the original data. The corresponding author also advised that the other authors were not involved in making the figures. The corresponding author agreed to three papers being retracted. The Editor decided to retract the fourth paper as well. All authors were made aware of the decision to retract.