Jan Hendrik Schön

The University of Konstanz requested return of Schön's doctorate in 2004, not because his thesis had been found fraudulent, but based on his subsequent scientific conduct. Following objections and litigation, a first-instance judgment temporarily found in his favour in 2010, before Baden-Württemberg's higher court upheld revocation in 2011; subsequent appeals did not reverse the outcome and the decision became final in 2014.

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The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft's Joint Committee sanctioned Schön after its own proceedings: a reprimand, loss of voting rights and committee positions within DFG for eight years, inability to act as a peer reviewer and prohibition on applying for DFG funding during the same period.

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American Physical Society journals retracted six Schön papers. Two were explicitly covered by the Lucent/Bell Labs investigation; four others, not examined in that investigation, were also withdrawn following editorial reassessment.

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Nature published seven retraction notices covering Schön's papers in the journal following the investigation into the validity of his data. Together with the Science and Physical Review retractions, the wave removed much of his high-impact research output.

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Independent groups attempted to reproduce key results associated with Schön's molecular and organic devices without observing the reported phenomena. These failures, already significant before all editorial sanctions were published, reinforced doubts about his experimental programme.

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After replication failures and the discovery of identical experimental curves or noise in supposedly different experiments, Bell Labs commissioned an independent committee to examine 25 papers. The report concluded that Jan Hendrik Schön, rather than his co-authors, had committed scientific misconduct in at least sixteen cases by fabricating or falsifying data. Bell Labs terminated his employment.

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Following publication of Bell Labs' investigation report, the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart asked the Max Planck Society's presidency not to appoint Schön as a director. The organisation announced that no offer would be made; the process had already been suspended when the suspicions first emerged.

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The Otto Klung Foundation board, Weberbank's supporting association and the physics selection committee unanimously withdrew Schön's 2001 Otto-Klung-Weberbank Physics Prize, awarded for research into organic semiconductors and superconductivity.

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Following the Bell Labs report, co-authors requested the retraction of eight papers published in Science concerning molecular electronics, superconductivity and organic devices. This was then the largest group of retractions published by the journal.

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Directly implicated