Employees at the university have accused president Masahiro Yoshimoto of duplication between 11 sets of his published papers – implicating 34 papers in total. The employees submitted the allegations to the institution last October, backing their claims with an analysis by plagiarism detection software iThenticate.
The latest correction concerns a 2005 paper from a Japanese journal announcing the development of a novel semiconductor alloy. Just one year later, a second – now corrected – paper claiming to have achieved the same feat “for the first time” was published in the journal physica status solidi (a), with three overlapping authors from the original article.
Last July, before KIT’s investigation, another journal published a correction to Yoshimoto’s work for a similar reason. The correction – for a 2007 paper in the Japanese Journal of Applied Physics – added references to reproduced data from another 2007 paper published by the same three authors, including Yoshimoto. The correction stated the work nevertheless “highlighted a critical new insight” which was absent in the previous paper.
According to a translation of the verdict, the committee found the papers that appeared to be duplicates in fact “contained different knowledge and novelty” from the earlier papers. The committee also determined Yoshimoto and his co-authors had not duplicated, since they had made appropriate citations and the similarities were within an acceptable range. The investigation’s findings are not publicly available. The anonymous employees have tried to obtain the full report from university officials and Japan’s ministry of education, but have so far been unsuccessful.
