Plagiarized figure hurts arthritis paper

A paper on a way to inhibit arthritis has been retracted following an investigation confirming that it plagiarizes a figure from another paper on the same topic.

The paper, “Blockade of 11β-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase type 1 enzyme inhibits experimental collagenase-induced osteoarthritis,” was published in Molecular Medicine Reports. A figure claims to show cartilage treated with a specific inhibitor:

The retraction note tells us that the authors reproduced the figure from another paper in Inflammation — which describes a different inhibitor:

This manuscript has been retracted by the Editorial Board of Molecular Medicine Reports, following an investigation prompted by the authors of the article mentioned below and the Editor of the Journal, Inflammation. Fig. 1 in this manuscript was reproduced in its entirety from the following study: Gyurkovska V, Stefanova T, Dimitrova P, Danova S, Tropcheva R and Ivanovska N: Tyrosine kinase inhibitor tyrphostin AG490 retards chronic joint inflammation in mice. Inflammation 37: 995-1005, 2014. Every effort was made on the part of the publisher to contact the authors on the Molecular Medicine Reports paper, but were unable to do so. As a result, this article has been retracted by the Editorial Board of Molecular Medicine Reports. [The original article was published in Molecular Medicine Reports 11: 2071‑2075, 2015 DOI: 10.3893/mmr.2014.2983].

The paper has not been cited, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.

We’ve reached out to last author Shuya Guo, who works at Shandong University, and to the corresponding author of the Inflammation paper — Nina Ivanovska at the Institute of Microbiology in Bulgaria — for more information. We’ll update this post with anything else we learn.

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