Retraction: Individual external dose monitoring of all citizens of Date City by passive dosimeter 5 to 51 months after the Fukushima NPP accident (series): II. Prediction of lifetime additional effective dose and evaluating the effect of decontamination on individual dose (2017 J. Radiol. Prot.37 623)

Following the Expression of Concern issued on this article on 11 January 2019, IOP Publishing is now retracting this article. On 4 June 2020, IOP Publishing received confirmation from the authors of 2017 J. Radiol. Prot. 37 623 (the second in a series of two research articles) that ethically inappropriate data were used in the study reported in this article. This confirmation follows an investigation into the matter by Date City Citizen's Exposure Data Provision Investigation Committee, which finds that "It was inappropriate for Date City to provide the external exposure data to the researchers without checking that the data of non-consenting persons were contained and without deleting the data of non-consenting persons. ... When receiving the data from Date City, the researchers also should have taken careful measures, such as checking whether the information on non-consenting persons was included or not." IOP Publishing believes that the authors were unaware of the ethical problems with this data, which was supplied by Date City. The results of this investigation are available (in Japanese) at https://www.city.fukushima-date.lg.jp/soshiki/3/39948.html (IOP Publishing and the Society for Radiological Protection take no responsibility for the content at this link). Date City Council wishes to clarify that the Investigation Committee was not a committee for investigating scientific misconduct, and it did not investigate the research content or the Papers.

The readers are asked to note that, as part of the article submission process, the authors of the above referenced article confirmed that the research reported in the article adhered to the Ethical Policy of IOP Publishing and the Society for Radiological Protection.

As a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), this matter has been investigated by IOP Publishing in accordance with COPE guidelines and it was decided that the article should be retracted. The authors agree with this retraction and have fully complied with all investigations.

More details are expected to be forthcoming. However, in line with COPE guidelines, we are retracting this article promptly and will update this retraction notice with more information, as necessary and as it is released.

The authors have reported two additional corrections that should be made to this retracted article:

• Equation (1) has the wrong normalization constant and needs to be corrected. In other words, each exponent t should read t − 0.65, and a normalization factor "N" should be added.
• There was an error in the calculation process with which we generated the box-and-whisker plot in Fig. 7. This needs to be corrected as follows:
  • In Fig. 6, the 3-months cumulative glass-badge doses D1, D2, ... (D1 being the first measured value, D2 the second,...) were converted to the external exposure dose rates per hour r1, r2, ..., and are displayed as the box-and-whisker plot. The conversion formula is r = D / 3 / 30.5 / 24 * 1000 = D * 0.455.
  • In Fig. 7, we intended to show the accumulated doses (D1, D1 + D2, D1 + D2 + D3,...), but we erroneously calculated (r1, r1 + r2, r1 + r2 + r3,...) in the analysis program. To get the correct values, all the data in Fig. 7 must be multiplied by a factor D / r = 1/0.455 = 2.2.

The authors apologise to the readers for these errors, and thank the readers that brought these issues to their attention.